Characteristics Of Emotional Memory Impairment In Patients With Primary Insomnia

Background:Patients with chronic insomnia who even though have enough sleep time, suitable sleep Surrounding, however subjective feeling difficulty in falling asleep or sustaining sleep, consequently, the sleep persistent period and/or quality of sleep hard to meet the individual physiological drive, and impact the daytime functions. Insomnia may induce the impairment of cognitive function, containing attention, memory, executive function, alertness, especially about the ability of memory. However, the major research regarding the association between insomnia and memory, previously, concentrate on working memory, declarative memory, spatial memory. It’s hard to find the study about the relationship between insomnia with emotional memory using neuropsychological tests. In addition, the investigators who desired the previous research didn’t distinguish the isoforms of insomnia which lead to the disparity of sample. In this study used the emotional pictures survey PI patients’emotional memory in order to access the effects of emotional memory of primary insomnia.Objective:To investigate the emotional memory impairment in patients with Primary insomnia(PI) and explore the neurobiological mechanisms underlying primary insomnia through emotional memory tasks involved different valance of emotional pictures.Methods:Thirty patients with primary insomnia(PPI) and twenty healthy controls(HCs) were given emotional memory tasks using positive, neutral and negative valence images. The emotional memory was evaluated by the recognition of emotional pictures.Results:Compared with healthy controls (positive (11.60±4.00), neutral (11.05±3.73) and negative (12.60±2.06), respectively), patients with primary insomnia (positive (11.30±3.75), neutral (11.47±3.21) and negative (11.43±4.12), respectively) showed no significant difference in appraisal of the emotional pictures (P>0.05). When compared with healthy controls (43.40±4.88) for the emotional images memorizing task, patients with primary insomnia (39.40±6.43) exhibited evident deficit of all emotional images (P<0.05). Furthermore, the accuracy of patients with primary insomnia in recognizing both positive (12.60±2.42) and neutral (12.87±3.18) valence pictures were significantly lower than that (positive (14.05±2.19) and neutral (14.75±1.80)) in healthy controls (P<0.05). There was no significant impairment in negative stimulus (P>0.05).Conclusion:The results suggest that emotional memory is impaired in the patients with primary insomnia. Moreover, the emotional memory for positive and neutral vanlence pictures is impaired but the emotional memory for negative is relatively spared in patients with primary insomnia. The results also indicate that impaired emotional memory with different valences may through distinct neuromechanisms.