Effect of sleep deprivation on emotional working memory

Abstract

The emotional dysregulation and impaired working memory found after sleep loss can have severe implications for our daily functioning. Considering the intertwined relationship between emotion and cognition in stimuli processing, there could be further implications of sleep deprivation in high-complex emotional situations.Although studied separately, this interaction between emotion and cognitive processes has been neglected in sleep research. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effect of 1 night of sleep deprivation on emotional working memory.Sixty-one healthy participants (mean age: 23.4 years) were either sleep deprived for 1 night (n = 30) or had a normal night's sleep (n = 31). They performed an N-back task with two levels of working memory load (1-back and 3-back) using positive, neutral and negative picture scenes. Sleep deprivation, compared with full night sleep, impaired emotional working memory accuracy, but not reaction times. The sleep-deprived participants, but not the controls, responded faster to positive than to negative and neutral pictures. The effect of sleep deprivation was similar for both high and low working memory loads. The results showed that although detrimental in terms of accuracy, sleep deprivation did not impair working memory speed. In fact, our findings indicate that positive stimuli may facilitate working memory processing speed after sleep deprivation. K E Y W O R D Saffective significance, executive functions, positivity effect, sleep loss, sustained wakefulness

High-Frequency Repetitive Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation Could Improve Impaired Working Memory Induced by Sleep Deprivation

“…These all can prove the existence of the effect of SD, with or without a sham rTMS condition in the study. In addition, specifically for emotional working memory, one night of SD may just impair the accuracy but not reaction time [41]. This similar performance was observed after rTMS in our study and just showed significant change in the response accuracy of the number test but not reaction time.…”

“…Growing evidence has demonstrated the critical impairments of SD on various cognitive abilities, especially on working memory both in younger and older healthy adults, after total SD or partial SD [14,15,[39][40][41][42][43]. Behavioral results of almost all these past studies found that subjects showed a significantly lower response accuracy rate, longer reaction time, and higher lapse rate on the working memory test after SD 4…”

Positivity Effect and Working Memory Performance Remains Intact in Older Adults After Sleep Deprivation

“…The task and study protocol were the same as reported recently for younger adults (Gerhardsson et al, 2019). All participants performed a practice run of the emotional working memory task in relation to the screening interview 1 week before the experiment.…”

“…Moreover, in young adults, lack of sleep causes alterations in emotional processing (Tempesta et al, 2018), primarily by increased reactivity to emotional stimuli and an impaired ability to regulate emotional reactivity (Yoo et al, 2007; Gujar et al, 2011). We recently reported that sleep deprived younger adults (18–30 years), but not the controls (with full sleep), responded faster to positive and slower to negative relative to neutral pictures on an emotional working memory task, which could be interpreted as a positivity effect (Gerhardsson et al, 2019). We also found that sleep deprivation overall impaired accuracy and omission rate, but not reaction times.…”

Multimodal Emotion Recognition Is Resilient to Insufficient Sleep: Results From Cross-Sectional and Experimental Studies

“…This is because of evidence that one's emotional state can moderate performance in certain cognitive tasks, sometimes referred to as the difference between hot cognition (when cognition can be influenced by emotional state) and cold cognition (cognitive performance that is not influenced by emotion) (Smilek & Frischen, 2013). Examples of sleep loss leading to changes in hot cognition include one study that found sleep deprivation caused valence-specific performance changes in an emotional working-memory task (Gerhardsson et al, 2019). Another example comes from the effects of sleep loss on emotionally dependent decision making tasks (Pace-Schott, Nave, Morgan, & Spencer, 2012).…”