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Neural reactivation of self-relevant traits during sleep predicts selective consolidation of the positive self

Poster Session F - Tuesday, March 10, 2026, 8:00 – 10:00 am PDT, Fairview/Kitsilano Ballroom

Ziqing YAO¹ (), Danni CHEN¹, Jing LIU², Tao XIA¹, Chris Xie CHEN³, Rachel Ngan Yin CHAN³, Shirley Xin LI¹, Yina MA⁴, Xiaoqing HU¹; ¹Department of Psychology, The University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China, ²School of Psychology, South China Normal University, Guangzhou, China, ³Department of Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China, ⁴Faculty of Psychology, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China

Depression is characterized by negative self-schema, i.e., a habitual tendency to interpret one’s own qualities and experiences negatively. Strengthening positive self-referential memory may foster resilience and counteract depression. We tested whether replaying positive personality traits during non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep through targeted memory reactivation (TMR) promotes positive self-evaluation and to what extent individual differences in depressive symptoms modulate this effect. Sixty-five adults completed a baseline self-referential encoding task in which they evaluated whether a series of positive or negative personality adjectives described themselves, followed by overnight sleep. During stable NREM sleep, half of the positive traits and neutral adjectives were re-played to sleeping participants. Participants repeated the task immediately after awakening and approximately three days later. Bayesian linear mixed-effects models showed that TMR selectively increased self-endorsements for cued positive traits relative to uncued ones, with larger TMR benefits among individuals reporting lower depressive symptoms. Cue-locked EEG analyses revealed enhanced delta–theta and sigma power for positive-trait cues compared to neutral adjectives. Representational similarity analysis indicated that differences in sigma band power features during 2.3–2.76 s post-cue intervals positively correlated with changes in self-referential endorsement, linking sleep physiology to behavioral change. During TMR, cue-locked slow traveling waves propagating backward predicted greater positive self-endorsement. Together, these findings demonstrate that positive traits can be selectively reactivated during sleep with item-specific neural representation. However, this reactivation process was reduced in individuals with higher depressive symptoms, suggesting impaired offline consolidation of positive self-referential memories as a potential mechanism underlying negative self-schema in depression.

Topic Area: EMOTION & SOCIAL: Self perception