024-22 – Covid-19 related stress and emotion regulation: An examination of their effect on sleep, dreams, and social cognition.

Many studies have considered the effect that stress can exert over our sleep, with research indicating that sleep physiology, and multiple dream variables are impacted by emotional stressors; however, far fewer studies have examined how stress disrupts subtle aspects of social cognition such as perceiving and interpretating social stimuli. Stress has also shown signs of impairing our ability to identify emotions during social situations, as attention is focussed internally, therefore undermining our ability to perceive external emotional cues. Using data collected during the COVID-19 pandemic, we set out to address how individuals’ control and regulate their emotions, as this could elucidate how stress is able to exert its damaging psychological, and cognitive effects. Specifically, this study considered the use of expressive suppression and cognitive reappraisal, two common emotion regulation (ER) strategies that influence our sleep, and dreams. This was an online cross-sectional survey to determine whether COVID-19 stress and two ER strategies significantly impacted sleep, dreams, and emotional processing of social information. To assess emotional processing, the Reading the Eyes in the Mind test was used. This test requires participants to identify emotions by looking at static images of eyes. The data was collected during the pandemic, meaning that our participants were reporting on an ecologically salient stressor. (N=80) 54 females, and 26 were males, with an average age of 24. Statistical analysis was undertaken using multiple linear regressions. There were no significant effects observed on sleep; however, covid stress significantly increased the intensity of participants dreams and disrupted their ability to correctly identify emotions. No significant effects were observed for either ER strategy. These findings demonstrate the diverse effects of chronic covid-related stress, with disruption observed across both emotional processing and dream mentation.