Skin conductance measurements reveal link between insomnia and disrupted fear regulation

These findings suggest that because people with insomnia failed to fully acquire the safety memory on the first day or retain it until the second day, the new extinction memory was too weak to oppose the original fear memory during recall.

"Hyperarousal is thought to be an underlying risk factor for developing insomnia, and we were excited to see that sophisticated mathematical parsing of skin conductance revealed the same effect we had previously observed using fMRI," co-author Dr Edward Pace-Schott writes. "This hyperarousal could oppose subsequent learning that a stimulus has become safe, which may explain why anxiety treatments like exposure therapy are more successful in people with good sleep."

Co-author Dr Saman Khazaei concludes: "I find it interesting to see that decoded arousal from certain components of skin conductance reflects a signature of a disrupted fear response in people diagnosed with insomnia. This finding may motivate further research on skin conductance and the use of wearable devices that measure it to improve sleep in everyday-life settings."

Source:

PLOS

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