Personal Traits of Circadian Rhythm and Treatment Efficacy on Emotional Regulation in Insomnia

Insomnia is a regular sleep disturbance with prevalence rate on 30% or general adults. Among the insomnia patients, about 10% cases accompany with reduction of cognitive performance and emotional dysregulation, severely impacts the patients’ normal life and working ability. Previous studies regarded insomnia as the comorbidity of other mental disorders, and focused on the stress events triggered insomnia (Precipitating factor). However, Spielman addressed that the Predisposing factor is also a significant factor that induces insomnia, which indicating the subject’s mental or physical vulnerability facilitating the occurrence of insomnia. Recent studies indicated that the physiological hyperarousal under stress easily induces insomnia, but without specific stress events, the feature of easy insomnia induction is hardly identified. Therefore, we hypothesize that the participants with hyperarousal may experience stronger emotional perception following emotional stimuli. Through this approach, we expect to identify specific personal traits, either mental or physical aspects, can reflect the person’s vulnerability to emotional dysregulation or insomnia. The major purpose of this project is to explore the individual precipitating factors for both insomnia and emotional perception. Furthermore, circadian rhythms may be a crucial confounding factor that affects the neurophysiological measurements. Therefore, we include the circadian rhythms into our experimental design and attempt to enhance the sensitivity to detect each individual emotional response by introducing the insomnia treatments. This subproject is designed as longitudinal studies across three years (considering both circadian effect and therapy effect), collecting 24 healthy participants and 48 chronic insomnia patients, dividing the insomnia into drug group and cognitive behavioral therapy group (24 for each). To explore the connection between personal traits, physiological data and emotional perception, we will collect multimodal mental and physical indices to explore individual emotional responses, including 10 psychological tests, saliva sample for cortisol and melatonin, and brain mapping by magnetic resonance imaging. To the issue of emotion, we expect to identify the specific personal traits that cause neuroplasticity and lead to insomnia and emotional dysregulation. To sleep medicine, we expect to predict the better therapeutic effect by selected personal traits.