Overnight emotional inertia in relation to depressive symptomatology and subjective sleep quality

Abstract

Emotions show a certain degree of continuity during the day, a quality referred to as emotional inertia, and that is typically elevated in depression. Little is known however about the extent to which our emotional experiences may or may not also persist overnight. Do our feelings continue from evening to morning or not? And how is this related to depressive symptoms and sleep quality? In an experience sampling studies in healthy subjects (ns = 123) we investigated (1) to what extent people’s mood, in terms of positive and negative affect, in the morning, after a night of sleep, can be predicted from their mood of the evening before, and whether this is moderated by (2) depressive symptom severity or (3) subjective sleep quality. Results showed that morning negative affect could be strongly predicted based on previous evening negative affect, whilst this carry-over effect was not observed for positive affect, indicating that negative affect shows a general tendency to persist overnight, while positive affect did not show such continuity. The overnight prediction of both negative and positive affect was not moderated by level of depressive symptoms, nor by subjective sleep quality.