Untreated disrupted sleep is an important precursor for the development of depression. Several studies have confirmed the negative impact of pre-sleep cognitive and emotional activity such as worry and negative affect on subsequent sleep. Emotional stress may affect latencies to sleep onset, to REM-sleep and other markers of sleep disruption such as arousals. The way we cope with emotional stressors and events may have important effects on subsequent sleep.

In this study we investigated the effects of a failure-experience on polysomnographically recorded sleep in volunteers. Furthermore we explored whether dispositional coping factors such as emotion regulation moderate this effect.

In contrast to the control condition the effect of the failure induction was clearly observed in emotional experience as well as within the physiological sleep architecture. Furthermore, we notice a tendency in which not only emotional experience, but also sleep physiology was affected by low and high emotional approach as emotion regulation style (cf. Stanton, 2000).

The present study has shown that emotional stress as a failure experience before sleep-goes together with a worsening of mood, an increase of level of rumination and enhanced sleep fragmentation with a moderating effect of emotion regulation as dispositional factor.