The human emotional brain without sleep — a prefrontal amygdala disconnect

Cardiac Vagal Control and Depressive Symptoms: The Moderating Role of Sleep Quality

“…Sleep disturbances and even mildly decreased sleep quality disrupt higher cognitive functions that may support emotion regulation (Mauss et al, 2013). Moreover, sleep deprivation (an analogue to severe sleep disturbances) reduces functional connectivity between brain regions related to cognitive control and emotional responses (e.g., medial prefrontal cortex, amygdala; Yoo, Gujar, Hu, Jolesz, & Walker, 2007). This may reflect decreased prefrontal control of emotions.…”

The sleep phenotype of Borderline Personality Disorder: A systematic review and meta-analysis

“…As hypothesised in the "emotional cascades" theory of BPD, daytime dysregulation may spill over into the night-time increasing risk of sleep disturbance, which in turn may further contribute to dysregulation in a positive feedback loop . Increased amygdala responsiveness to dream stimuli (Nielsen & Stenstrom, 2005) leading to hyper-activity of the limbic system (Yoo, Gujar, Hu, Jolesz, & Walker, 2007) may represent one potential physiological mechanism contributing to this cycle.…”

“…Studies incorporating a range of psychopathological outcomes (e.g., BPD, depression, psychosis, bipolar disorder, anxiety) simultaneously may help shed further light on the specific nature of sleep problems in BPD across development (Harvey, 2015). Such studies should be complemented by experimental and micro-longitudinal (McCall et al, 2010) designs to investigate the proximal impact of sleep disruptions on BPD symptoms at the biological (Yoo et al, 2007) and phenotypical (Anderson & Platten, 2011) level. It should be highlighted that the BPD diagnosis (in the categorical form used in many of the included studies) comprises a heterogeneous group of individuals.…”

Facial emotion recognition and sleep in mentally disordered patients: A natural experiment in a high security hospital

“…Neuroimaging studies suggest that neural systems that suffer from sleep deprivation have a substantially amplified amygdala response to negative stimuli coupled with a breakdown in prefrontal control; that is, a dysregulation in autonomic affective physiology (Yoo et al, 2007;Killgore, 2013). The deficits in emotion processing that are observed in individuals with schizophrenia have also been linked directly with abnormal amygdala activation, and in particular, when negative emotion is involved (Takahashi et al, 2004).…”