Sleep reactivation of positive self-evaluation reveals neural-evaluative alignment that varies with depressive symptoms

Authors

Yao, Z., Chen, D., Liu, J., Wei, J., Xia, T., Zuo, X., Chen, C. X., Chan, R. N. Y., Li, S. X., Qin, P., Yuan, T., Zhang, Z., Lee, T. M. C., Ma, Y., Hu, X.

Abstract

Positive self-evaluation underpins resilience and mental health, yet how to enhance positive self-evaluation and the underlying neurocognitive mechanisms remain poorly understood. Existing data mostly examined self-evaluative processing of the wakeful minds, with the role of sleep remain unexplored. Here, we demonstrated that reactivation of positive self-evaluation during sleep revealed fine-grained neural-evaluative alignment that varies with depressive symptoms. We found that targeted reactivation of positive personality traits during non-rapid eye movement (NREM) sleep enhanced positive self-evaluation, but this benefit diminished with elevated depressive symptoms. Moreover, cueing positive traits during NREM sleep elicited trait-specific, 11-16 Hz EEG sigma power-based neural representations that aligned with post-sleep positive self-evaluative representational structures, as revealed by representational similarity analyses. Notably, individuals with elevated depressive symptoms exhibited weaker neural-evaluative representational alignments, identifying a maladaptive self-evaluative processing that bridges across sleep and wakefulness states. These findings provide mechanistic insights on how fine-grained neural-evaluative alignment can substantiate positive self-evaluation, and why it was disrupted as depressive symptoms increased.

Preprint server: bioRxiv
The authors list and abstract were imported from bioRxiv on 30 Jul 2026.

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