Per Davidson

My main research interest has been to examine the effect of sleep on emotional memories – if sleep is a more beneficial stage than wake for memory consolidation, if sleep sorts these memories differently than wake based on their perceived future relevance, and if sleep to a larger extent than wakefulness helps us make generalizations based on these memories to make them more applicable in novel situations. I have also done research on whether sleep helps to reduce the affective tone associated with these memories.

In my research I have mainly utilized various fear conditioning paradigms, but I have also examined declarative memory and motivated forgetting. A big interest for me has been why this field of research, and psychology in general, has been so unsuccessful at producing replicable research findings.

I am currently working on a large multi-lab collaboration project in which we are testing whether a daytime nap consolidates the memory of encoded images, whether sleep has a larger effect for emotional memories compared to neutral ones, and whether sleep decreases the affective reponse to the emotional images to a larger degree than time spent awake.