別帶着怒氣入眠! 小心強化腦中負面記憶!
Never go to bed angry, the old saying goes, or bad feeling will harden into resentment.
有句老話說，千萬不要帶着怒氣入睡，否則糟糕的情緒會轉化成怨恨。
Now scientists have found evidence to support the idea that negative emotional memories are harder to reverse after a night's sleep.
如今科學家們發現了支持這種觀點的證據：負面情緒記憶在過夜後更難逆轉。
The study, published in the journal Nature Communications, suggests that during sleep, the brain reorganises the way negative memories are stored, making these associations harder to suppress in the future.
這項發表在《自然通訊》雜誌上的研究稱，在睡眠中，人的大腦會重新組織負面記憶的儲存方式，使這些感覺日後更加難以壓制。
"In our opinion, yes, there is certain merit in this age-old advice," said Yunzhe Liu, who led the research at Beijing Normal University and is now based at University College London.
"在我們看來，老話還是有它的道理的。"領導本次研究、來自北京師範大學的劉雲哲說道。他目前的工作地點在英國倫敦大學學院。
"We would suggest to first resolve argument before going to bed; don't sleep on your anger."
"我們建議睡覺前先解決爭端；不要帶着怒氣睡覺。"
The study, conducted over two days, used a psychological technique known as the "think/no-think" task to test how successfully 73 male students suppressed memories.
該研究在兩天內完成，採用一種叫做"想不想"的心理學方法，成功測試了73名男性是如何抑制記憶的。
First, the men learnt to associate pairs of neutral faces and unsettling images, such as injured people, crying children or corpses. Next, they were shown the faces again and told to either actively think of the associated picture or to consciously avoid thinking of it.
首先，受試者接受了將中性面孔與令人不安的圖像聯繫起來的訓練，比如受傷的人、哭泣的孩子或屍體。接着，他們會看到中性的面孔，並被告知可以主動想起相關聯的圖像，或者有意識地避免回憶起那些圖像。
When this session was conducted just 30 minutes after the initial learning, the participants were 9% less likely to remember the images that they had avoided thinking about compared to control image pairs – the suppression had been effective.
當這個實驗在初始培訓後30分鐘進行時，與對照組相比，9%的參與者不太會記起他們努力避免記起的圖像，這就表明記憶抑制效果很明顯。
However, when the suppression session was carried out 24 hours after the initial learning, after a good night's sleep, they were only 3% less likely to recall the image.
然而，當初始培訓24小時後再進行該實驗，人們在睡了一個好覺之後，只有3%的人不太會回憶起圖像。
Brain scans offered a clue to why memories may be more difficult to unpick once they have been consolidated by sleep.
腦部掃描爲我們提供了爲何經睡眠鞏固後的記憶更難以消散的線索。
Functional MRI scans of the participants revealed that newly acquired memories were represented by brain activity tightly centred on the hippocampus, the brain's memory centre, but the overnight memories had become more distributed across the cortex.
對受試者的功能性核磁共振掃描表明，新獲得的記憶是通過以海馬體（大腦的記憶中心）爲中心的大腦活動呈現的。然而，過了一夜後，記憶會在大腦皮層內更加分散。
The authors caution that the findings were in healthy participants and are not immediately applicable to conditions like PTSD – and expecting people who have undergone a traumatic experience to start working on suppressing the memory on the same day is "probably not realistic advice".
作者提醒稱，該研究是基於健康的受試者的，不能立即應用到諸如創傷後精神緊張性障礙等情況，而且指望有過慘痛經歷的人能夠當天抑制記憶"是不現實的建議"。
However the research could help design evidence-based treatments for PTSD in the future.
但在未來，這項研究或許會有助於對創傷後精神緊張性障礙設計循證治療。
