Overnight Therapy: Treating PTSD Through Sleep Engineering

Within the Sleep Lab here at CUBRIC, the research focusses on sleep engineering as a potential treatment for PTSD. This involves a technique called targeted memory reactivation, where sound cues presented at certain stages of sleep elicit reactivations of specific memories. The project investigates the effects this has on fear memories, using a simple model of behavioural learning, classical conditioning.

Using psychophysiological measures such as skin conductance and heart rate variability, as well as EEG and fMRI to study people's responses to fearful and neutral stimuli. It will also look at the effects of individual differences in trait anxiety and the extent to which this may mediate the effects of cueing during sleep.