Assessing the impact of total sleep deprivation (TSD) on emotion regulation and emotion recognition
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Abstract
BACKGROUND: Sleep loss is currently an epidemic with one-third of American adults aged 24-40 years old reporting shortened sleep duration within the last five years. There has been growing evidence on how sleep restriction and deprivation have deleterious effects on cognitive functioning, mood, mental health, metabolic and immune systems. Sleep loss has also been categorized as both a risk factor for the manifestation of psychiatric symptoms and as a secondary symptom for individuals diagnosed with depression and anxiety. Some studies have established that total sleep deprivation or chronic sleep restriction negatively affects adequate emotional functioning and self-regulation. Other studies have shown that the effects of sleep deprivation further extend to how the human brain is able to respond to facial expressions, with studies concluding that sleep loss significantly impairs the accurate recognition of happy, sad, and angry faces.
OBJECTIVE: The present study aims to assess the effects of a single night of total sleep deprivation on perceived emotion regulation and facial expression recognition.
METHODS: A sample of healthy adults aged 18-35 arrived at the hospital at approximately 8:30PM and answered several questionnaires to assess perceived depressive and anxiety traits, sleep disturbance, emotion regulation, and sleepiness over the course of a day, as well as computer tasks evaluating emotional perception and memory. Participants in the sleep-deprived group were kept awake the whole night and repeated tasks the following morning. The well-rested participants were dismissed at approximately 11:00PM for a full night of rest at home before returning to the clinic at 8:30AM the following morning to complete additional tasks. Perceived emotion regulation was assessed using the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ) and emotion recognition was assessed using a morphed faces paradigm which featured a set of faces with Sad, Happy, Angry and Neutral expressions. Participants were instructed to categorize each emotion and then rate the intensity of the emotion at varying levels of intensity.
RESULTS: With regards to perceived emotion regulation abilities, the sleep-deprived group showed a significant decrease in cognitive reappraisal scores pre- to post-sleep manipulation, and no change in expressive suppression scores. The rested group showed no change across a period of sleep. Furthermore, there was a significant decrease in the sleep deprivation group’s ability to accurately label emotions in all emotional categories compared to the sleep control group. When examining intensity ratings, the sleep-deprived group rated faces as less intense starting at the moderate range of intensity and higher, while the sleep group demonstrated no significant change across the sleep period.
CONCLUSIONS: Sleep deprivation had a significant effect on self-perceived adaptive emotion regulation abilities, such as cognitive reappraisal, and no effect on maladaptive expressive suppression strategies. There is also an association between sleep loss and a decreased accuracy in identifying emotional faces, as well as a significant blunting effect in how intense an individual perceives emotional faces when in a sleep-deprived state.
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2024