Sleep deprivation impairs recognition of specific emotions

Abstract

Emotional processing is particularly sensitive to sleep deprivation, but research on the topic has been limited and prior studies have generally evaluated only a circumscribed subset of emotion categories. Here, we evaluated the effects of one night of sleep deprivation and a night of subsequent recovery sleep on the ability to identify the six most widely agreed upon basic emotion categories (happiness, surprise, fear, sadness, disgust, anger). Healthy adults (29 males; 25 females) classified a series of 120 standard facial expressions that were computer morphed with their most highly confusable expression counterparts to create continua of expressions that differed in discriminability between emotion categories (e.g., combining 70% happiness+30% surprise; 90% surprise+10% fear). Accuracy at identifying the dominant emotion for each morph was assessed after a normal night of sleep, again following a night of total sleep deprivation, and finally after a night of recovery sleep. Sleep deprivation was associated with significantly reduced accuracy for identifying the expressions of happiness and sadness in the morphed faces. Gender differences in accuracy were not observed and none of the other emotions showed significant changes as a function of sleep loss. Accuracy returned to baseline after recovery sleep. Findings suggest that sleep deprivation adversely affects the recognition of subtle facial cues of happiness and sadness, the two emotions that are most relevant to highly evolved prosocial interpersonal interactions involving affiliation and empathy, while the recognition of other more primitive survival-oriented emotional face cues may be relatively robust against sleep loss.

The effect of sleep deprivation on leadership behaviour in military officers: an experimental study

“…By engaging in TL, a leader changes followers' cognitions, emotions and behaviour from a self‐oriented perspective into a community orientation by personal example and inspiring interactions (Bass and Riggio, ). This requires access to a broad spectrum of sleep‐vulnerable personal resources (Byrne et al ., ; Killgore et al ., ; Olsen et al ., ), such as positive affect (Rubin et al ., ), and hope and optimism (Peterson et al ., ). According to Hobfoll (), a leader depleted of such resources will take a more defensive posture, conversely to proactive TL.…”

Hyperarousal Is Associated with Socioemotional Processing in Individuals with Insomnia Symptoms and Good Sleepers

“…In light of the findings by Kyle and colleagues and the current findings of a relationship between beta EEG power during sleep and altered salience processing in insomnia, further research should be conducted on the interplay between hyperarousal during sleep and both affective disturbance and salience processing during wake. It is also suggested that poor sleep in insomnia may lead to performance deficits in emotional face perception, similarly to that which has been reported after nights of experimental sleep deprivation [82][83][84][85], which might also contribute to socioemotional impairment. The extent and type of emotional impairment after nights of poor sleep and hyperarousal in insomnia requires further investigation.…”

Behavioral and Neurophysiological Correlates of Dogs’ Individual Sensitivities to Being Observed by Their Owners While Performing a Repetitive Fetching Task

“…For example, sleep duration was found to be associated with peer acceptance and social engagement, two components of peer social competence (Vaughn et al, 2015). Sleep disturbance can lead to impaired social interactions (Gilbert et al, 2015) and reduce self-expression in social interactions (Condén et al, 2013) and has the potential to reduce the accuracy of identifying facial expressions of happiness and sadness (Crönlein et al, 2016;Killgore et al, 2017). The effect of sleep deprivation on facial emotion identification was also confirmed by the results of resting state EEG studies.…”