# The Impact of Insufficient Sleep and Insomnia Disorder on Behavioral and Neural Markers of Emotion Regulation

> **NIH NIH K23** · BETH ISRAEL DEACONESS MEDICAL CENTER · 2022 · $152,551

## Abstract

PROJECT SUMMARY
Healthy functioning necessitates an ability to manage our emotions. A growing body of evidence suggests that
sleep plays a crucial role in this adaptive process by maintaining the neural circuitry required to optimize emotion
regulation. Further, chronically disrupted sleep is a common feature and potentially an underlying cause of a
number of psychiatric disorders marked by impaired mood and emotion regulation, such as depression. The
consequences of this relationship become even more dire with the recognition that chronic sleep disruption more
than doubles the risk of suicide. The objective of the proposed study is to determine the overlapping and
differential impact of clinical insomnia in patients and multiple nights of insufficient sleep in healthy controls on
behavioral and neural responses during an emotion regulation task. My central hypothesis is that clinical sleep
disturbance and multiple nights of truncated sleep both disrupt the circuitry needed for successful emotion
regulation, and therefore are critical drivers in the dysregulation of emotional functioning. The primary rationale
is that a vast majority of our understanding of the relationship between disrupted sleep and emotion function has
relied either on single-night, acute sleep deprivation or assessment of trends in large samples, leaving a major
gap in understanding the mechanistic impact of longer, more chronic sleep loss on emotion regulation. This
information is essential to understand the degree to which different forms of disrupted sleep account for mood
and emotion dysregulation in a host of psychiatric conditions. In the proposed study, I will recruit patients with
Insomnia Disorder (ID; n=25) and healthy individuals that undergo a normal sleep (n=25) or sleep restriction
(n=25) protocol. All participants will complete an emotion regulation paradigm on two occasions, once as a
baseline, and a second time during functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI). I predict that when employing
emotion regulation strategies to aversive stimuli, sleep restricted participants and ID patients will have largely
overlapping behavioral and neural network outcomes, including impaired ability to volitionally reduce negative
behavioral responses, amygdala hyperactivity, and weaker negative connectivity between the amygdala and
prefrontal cortex. The study is a necessary next step in determining the behavioral and neural consequences of
chronic sleep disruption on the ability to effectively regulate emotions, which can then be used as targets for the
development of new therapies. My training plan adeptly complements both the technical and theoretical aspects
needed to successfully navigate the proposed project and my trajectory of future research. The selected activities
will provide the opportunity to develop expertise in the design of longitudinal sleep studies, fMRI data processing
and analysis, theoretical understanding of Insomnia Disorder and its relationship to ps...

## Key facts

- **NIH application ID:** 10449844
- **Project number:** 1K23MH127464-01A1
- **Recipient organization:** BETH ISRAEL DEACONESS MEDICAL CENTER
- **Principal Investigator:** Tony J Cunningham
- **Activity code:** K23 (R01, R21, SBIR, etc.)
- **Funding institute:** NIH
- **Fiscal year:** 2022
- **Award amount:** $152,551
- **Award type:** 1
- **Project period:** 2022-06-15 → 2027-05-31

## Primary source

NIH RePORTER: https://reporter.nih.gov/project-details/10449844

## Citation

> US National Institutes of Health, RePORTER application 10449844, The Impact of Insufficient Sleep and Insomnia Disorder on Behavioral and Neural Markers of Emotion Regulation (1K23MH127464-01A1). Retrieved via AI Analytics 2026-05-25 from https://api.ai-analytics.org/grant/nih/10449844. Licensed CC0.

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