Grant: Master's Award: Canada Graduate Scholarships

Amygdala; Cognitive-Behavioural Therapy For Insomnia; Emotion Reaction Task; Emotion Reactivity; Emotion Regulation; Functional Magnetic Imaging; Insomnia Disorder

Chronic insomnia is a sleep disorder that is defined as difficulty falling or staying asleep for at least 3 months. Some individuals with insomnia may also have trouble regulating their emotions, especially in response to sleep-related stimuli. They may experience intense emotions toward these stimuli, which can persist for a while before returning to baseline. Cognitive-behavioural therapy for insomnia (CBTi) – the gold standard treatment for chronic insomnia – includes strategies to alter maladaptive thoughts or actions that can negatively affect sleep, and techniques to improve sleep. But, some patients still experience sleep problems or associated issues after receiving the therapy. Researchers have used functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) to measure how active the amygdala – a brain region involved in emotion processing – is in response to sleep-related stimuli. They found that patients with insomnia had greater amygdala activity while viewing negative images related to insomnia compared to good sleepers. But, not much is known about the effectiveness of CBTi for emotion regulation among patients with insomnia. Thus, this project seeks to examine brain responses, using fMRI, of adults with insomnia and good sleepers while they perform an emotion task. We will examine the impact that CBTi has on how these patients regulate their emotions by assessing subjective ratings and brain responses. We will examine if brain activity while rating how much the sleep-related images elicits a negative emotion, prior to receiving CBTi, can allow us to predict whether or not they will respond to CBTi. Overall, we hope that this research will help us better understand if CBTi is helpful for patients to regulate their emotions when they encounter sleep-related stimuli.