Cognitive Appraisal of Sleep and Brain Activation in Response to Sleep-Related Sounds in Healthy Adults

Yunjee Hwang; Kyung Hwa Lee; Nambeom Kim; Jooyoung Lee; Ha Young Lee; Jeong Eun Jeon; Yu Jin Lee; Seog Ju Kim

doi:10.2147/NSS.S359242

Cognitive Appraisal of Sleep and Brain Activation in Response to Sleep-Related Sounds in Healthy Adults

Nat Sci Sleep. 2022 Aug 15:14:1407-1416. doi: 10.2147/NSS.S359242. eCollection 2022.

Authors

Yunjee Hwang¹, Kyung Hwa Lee^{2

3}, Nambeom Kim⁴, Jooyoung Lee⁵, Ha Young Lee², Jeong Eun Jeon², Yu Jin Lee², Seog Ju Kim⁵

Affiliations

¹ Department of Brain and Cognitive Engineering, Korea University, Seoul, Republic of Korea.
² Department of Psychiatry and Center for Sleep and Chronobiology, Seoul National University, College of Medicine and Hospital, Seoul, Republic of Korea.
³ Division of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, Department of Psychiatry, Seoul National University Hospital, Seoul, Republic of Korea.
⁴ Department of Biomedical Engineering Research Center, Gachon University, Incheon, Republic of Korea.
⁵ Department of Psychiatry, Sungkyunkwan University College of Medicine, Samsung Medical Center, Seoul, Republic of Korea.

Abstract

Purpose: Sounds play important roles in promoting and disrupting sleep. How our brain processes sleep-related sounds and individual differences in processing sleep-related sounds must be determined to understand the role of sound in sleep. We investigated neural responses to sleep-related sounds and their associations with cognitive appraisals of sleep.

Participants and methods: Forty-four healthy adults heard sleep-related and neutral sounds during functional magnetic resonance imaging using a 3T scanner. They also completed the Dysfunctional Beliefs and Attitudes about Sleep (DBAS) questionnaire, which was used to assess cognitive appraisals of sleep. We conducted a voxel-wise whole-brain analysis to compare brain activation in response to sleep-related and neutral sounds. We also examined the association between the DBAS score and brain activity in response to sleep-related sounds (vs neutral sounds) using region of interest (ROI) and whole-brain correlation analyses. The ROIs included the anterior cingulate cortex (ACC), anterior insula (AI), and amygdala.

Results: The whole-brain analysis revealed increased activation in the temporal regions and decreased activation in the ACC in response to sleep-related sounds compared to neutral sounds. The ROI and whole-brain correlation analyses showed that higher DBAS scores, indicating a negative appraisal of sleep, were significantly correlated with increased activation of the ACC, right medial prefrontal cortex, and brainstem in response to sleep-related sounds.

Conclusion: These results indicate that the temporal cortex and ACC, which are implicated in affective sound processing, may play important roles in the processing of sleep-related sounds. The positive association between the neural responses to sleep-related sounds and DBAS scores suggest that negative and dysfunctional appraisals of sleep may be an important factor in individual differences in the processing of sleep-related sounds.

Keywords: anterior cingulate cortex; appraisal; functional magnetic resonance imaging; sleep-related sounds.