Sleep loss does not impact ability to assess emotional information


Date:
October 11, 2021
Source:
Washington State University
Summary:
It's no secret that going without sleep can affect people's mood,
but a new study shows it does not interfere with their ability to
evaluate emotional situations. It is often assumed that feeling
more negative will color people's experience of emotional images
and events in the environment around them. However, researchers
found that while going 24 hours without sleep impacted study
participants' mood, it did not change their performance on tests
evaluating their ability to process emotional words and images.



FULL STORY ==========================================================================
It's no secret that going without sleep can affect people's mood, but
a new study shows it does not interfere with their ability to evaluate emotional situations.


==========================================================================
It is often assumed that feeling more negative will color people's
experience of emotional images and events in the environment around
them. However, Washington State University researchers found that while
going 24 hours without sleep impacted study participants' mood, it did
not change their performance on tests evaluating their ability to process emotional words and images.

"People do become less happy through sleep deprivation, but it's not
affecting how they are processing emotional stimuli in their environment,"
said Anthony Stenson, a WSU psychology doctoral student and lead author
of the study in Plos One.

The findings have implications for healthcare providers, law enforcement
and people in other long-hour professions who need to be able to
control their own emotions during stressful and emotionally trying
situations. Sleep loss in not likely to make them numb to emotional
situations, the researchers found, but it is likely to make them less
able to control their own emotional responses.

For the study, about 60 adult participants spent four consecutive days
in the Sleep and Performance Research Center at the WSU Elson S. Floyd
College of Medicine. All participants were allowed to sleep normally
the first night and then given a set of baseline tests to judge their
mood as well as their emotional regulation and processing ability. Then,
the researchers divided the participants into two groups: one group of
40 people spent the second night awake, while a control group of 20 were allowed a normal sleep period. The tests were then re-administered at
different intervals.

The emotional regulation and processing tests both involved viewing a
series of images with positive and negative emotional connotations. In
the emotional regulation tests, participants were given a prompt to help
them recontextualize negative images before seeing them and asked to
control their feelings. The sleep-deprived group had greater difficulty reducing the emotion they felt when instructed to do so.

The processing tests involved responding to words and images with
emotional content, for example rating the emotions conveyed by a smiling family, a growling dog or a crying child All participants performed
similarly on these tests whether they were sleep deprived or not.

The distinction between processing the emotional content of the world
around you and being able to regulate your own emotional responses is
an important one, especially for some professions, said co-author Paul
Whitney, a WSU professor of psychology.

"I don't think we want our first responders being numb to the emotional
nature of the situations they encounter, and it looks like they are not,"
he said. "On the other hand, reacting normally to emotional situations,
but not being able to control your own emotions, could be one reason sleep
loss sometimes produces catastrophic errors in stressful situations."
A lot of previous research has looked at how sleep deprivation impacts so called "cold" cognitive tasks -- supposedly emotionally neutral tasks like recalling facts. These studies have also found that regulation, which is considered a "top-down" cognitive process, is a major problem with cold cognitive tasks. For instance, mental flexibility is compromised by sleep deprivation. This is the ability an emergency room doctor might need to
quickly change tactics if a patient isn't responding to a treatment.

The current study shows that top-down regulation is a problem as well
with "hot" or emotional cognitive processes. Future research is needed
to understand whether the effects of sleep loss on the two top-down
processes are linked.

This study is the result of an ongoing collaboration among WSU psychology researchers and sleep experts at WSU College of Medicine. Other authors
include psychology post-doctoral fellow Courtney Kurinec as well as
psychology Professor John Hinson and College of Medicine Professor Hans
Van Dongen. All are also affiliated with the WSU Sleep and Performance
Research Center.

========================================================================== Story Source: Materials provided by Washington_State_University. Original written by Sara Zaske. Note: Content may be edited for style and length.


========================================================================== Journal Reference:
1. Anthony R. Stenson, Courtney A. Kurinec, John. M. Hinson, Paul
Whitney,
Hans P. A. Van Dongen. Total sleep deprivation reduces top-down
regulation of emotion without altering bottom-up affective
processing.

PLOS ONE, 2021; 16 (9): e0256983 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0256983 ==========================================================================

Link to news story: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2021/10/211011091255.htm

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