COVID-19 Related Stress and Emotion Regulation: An Examination of their Effect on Sleep, Dreaming, and Social Cognition.

Many studies have considered how stress impacts our sleep and dreams, but far fewer have examined how stress disrupts subtle aspects of social cognition, despite recent research suggesting that stress might impair certain subdomains, such as emotion recognition. Understanding how individuals control and regulate their emotions during times of distress, such as the COVID-19 pandemic, may be one way to help understand these associations. This online cross-sectional survey aimed to determine if COVID-19 stress and emotion regulation strategy impacted on sleep, dreams, and emotion recognition. A total of 80 participants were recruited, with an average age of 25 years. Participants were predominantly university students (87.5%), of which 67.5% were female. Statistical analysis was undertaken using multiple linear regressions. Increases in COVID-related stress enhanced the emotional intensity of participants dreams and disrupted their ability to correctly identify emotions (p0.05). These findings demonstrate the diverse effects of COVID-related stress on social cognition and dream mentation; suggesting that reducing stress could improve social cognition. Future work should consider if interventions aimed at stress reduction may have secondary effects related to the accurate processing of social information.