title: Sleep fragmentation and false memories during pregnancy and motherhood.
abstract: Pregnant women, both before and after childbirth, frequently experience memory deficits and disrupted sleep. In the present study we assessed the relationship between false memory generation and fragmented sleep during pregnancy and motherhood. We tested 178 pregnant women and 58 female non-pregnant childless controls, during pregnancy (15-35th week of gestation) and again after childbirth (8-13th month). False memories were defined as memories of gist words that were semantically related to studied word lists but were not presented during learning of these lists in the Deese-Roediger-McDermott (DRM) paradigm. Sleep was monitored by actigraphy in the home environment for seven consecutive nights. Compared to the controls, the group of pregnant women produced more false memories and displayed more fragmented sleep both during pregnancy and after childbirth. However, false memory generation was not correlated to measures of sleep fragmentation. These results show that pregnant women suffer from sleep fragmentation and a higher susceptibility to false memories, but leave open the question as to whether both phenomena are related.
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Technische Universität Dresden, D-01062 Dresden, Germany. Electronic address: christiane.berndt2@tu-dresden.de.
authors.forename: Christiane
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Berndt
authors.affiliation: Institute of Medical Psychology and Behavioral Neurobiology, Universität Tübingen, D-72074 Tübingen, Germany. Electronic address: susanne.diekelmann@uni-tuebingen.de.
authors.forename: Susanne
authors.initials: S
authors.lastname: Diekelmann
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Technische Universität Dresden, D-01062 Dresden, Germany. Electronic address: nina.alexander@tu-dresden.de.
authors.forename: Nina
authors.initials: N
authors.lastname: Alexander
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Technische Universität Dresden, D-01062 Dresden, Germany. Electronic address: AnnePustal@googlemail.com.
authors.forename: Anne
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Pustal
authors.affiliation: Department of Psychology, Technische Universität Dresden, D-01062 Dresden, Germany. Electronic address: clemens.kirschbaum@tu-dresden.de.
authors.forename: Clemens
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Kirschbaum
mesh_terms: D000328:Adult; D000704:Analysis of Variance; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D008569:Memory Disorders / Q000503:physiopathology*; D009035:Mothers / Q000523:psychology; D011247:Pregnancy / Q000523:psychology; D012892:Sleep Deprivation / Q000503:physiopathology*; D014706:Verbal Learning; D055815:Young Adult
keywords: Actigraphy; DRM paradigm; False memories; Motherhood; Pregnancy; Sleep fragmentation