Who, What, Why: Olivia Larson on sleep and memory in mental health disorders

The first page of Olivia Larson’s doctoral dissertation slides reads “Everybody sleeps,” accompanied by pictures of a rabbit snail, her cats, and her husband—all yawning or sleeping. Since she arrived at Penn in 2019, Larson’s academic focus has centered on the interplay of sleep and memory in mental health disorders.

Now in her final year of Penn’s clinical psychology program, Larson recently defended her dissertation. Following a VA Philadelphia externship last year helping veterans with insomnia, this year she is doing clinical rotations at Penn Medicine in areas of women’s behavioral health and wellness, consultation liaison psychiatry, and pain. “There are lots of opportunities to learn and to expand my narrow focus on sleep into these other domains,” she says.

When she is not sleeping or wakefully getting excited about sleep research, Larson says she finds time for Muay Thai, practicing her Greek, taking care of carnivorous plants and orchids with her husband, “wistfully watching House Hunters International,” or goofing around with—and supporting—her friends.

While completing her master’s degree at McGill University, Larson found she had a passion for designing experiments and working with people. Her dissertation includes three studies focusing on the effects of sleep enhancement, loss, and disturbance on cognitive functioning in psychopathology. “My overarching goal,” she says, “was to use sleep as a window into the mechanisms that link poor cognitive functioning with poor mental health.”

One of the studies found that people with and without depression exhibited similar deficits on cognitive tasks after sleep deprivation. Describing that work, she says it built on research showing that sleep deprivation can help improve mood in people with depression in some cases.

In another study, Larson reviewed data from mental health questionnaires and cognitive tests from 38,000 Army soldiers starting basic combat training to examine whether sleep mediates any preexisting associations between poor mental health and cognitive performance.

For the third study, she played a sound repeatedly in the background while guiding participants through a therapy technique to help them reframe negative memories. For some, she repeated that sound during a nap. She found that while everyone benefitted from the therapy and nap, cueing the memory with the sound didn’t impact vividness of the memory, feelings of distress, or physiological reactions to the negative memory. She says she welcomes more exploration of this new area of research, as other studies have shown more encouraging results.

When she was working in a lab after college studying sleep in patients with schizophrenia, Larson says that she “got bit by the sleep bug” and was hooked. She wanted to know more about something we spend a third of our lives doing.

She notes that research has shown that it’s important for attention, updating memories, and making decisions, yet sleep remains “a mysterious aspect of our evolution and survival.” Sleep problems have historically been thought of as symptoms of depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder, says Larson, but scientists are gaining more evidence that poor sleep can make the symptoms of psychiatric disorders worse.

Larson is also interested in the ways we can modify sleep, whether it’s through medications, cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, or newer experimental techniques.

And how does Larson sleep? “I actually sleep pretty well,” she admits, “I just think it’s so fascinating.”