The Relationship Between Quality of Sleep and Emotional Empathy

Abstract

Abstract. Sleep loss is known to severely disturb individuals’ mood and emotion processing. Here, we tested the hypothesis that quality of sleep is predictive of individuals’ performance on a task evaluating emotional empathy. We tested 34 healthy undergraduate students [19 males, mean (SD) age = 21.82 (3.26) years; mean (SD) education = 14.98 (1.91) years] recruited through the University of Calgary research participation system. We collected objective (actigraphy) and subjective (questionnaires and self-reports) sleep measures to characterize individuals’ sleep quality, and asked participants to solve a computerized emotional empathy task. We first performed a dimensionality reduction analysis on the sleep-related measures, which resulted in six principal components, and then ran a stepwise multiple regression analysis to investigate the sleep measures that best predicted participants’ scores on the emotional empathy task. We found that subjective sleep quality, together with sleep phase, best predicted participants’ empathic sensitivity to negative images while they explicitly evaluated the emotions of others (i.e., direct component of emotional empathy). Also, subjective sleep quality resulted to be the best predictor of participants’ arousal state in response to negative images, which is an implicit manifestation of their empathic experience (i.e., indirect component of emotional empathy). In both cases, lower subjective sleep quality was associated with lower empathic sensitivity to negative stimuli. Finally, sleep duration best predicted average empathic responses to stimuli of all valences, with shorter sleep durations associated with lower average empathic responses. Our findings provide evidence of a significant relationship between individuals’ quality of sleep and their ability to share the emotions experienced by others. These findings may have important implications for individuals employed in professions requiring social interaction and empathic experience coupled with schedules that interfere with nighttime sleep.

Sleep quality and its association with the insular cortex in emotional empathy

“…Although in the existing literature the effects of sleep quality on BOLD activity in mesolimbic areas are mixed, in our most recent work focusing solely on the emotional component of empathy, we identified that poorer sleep quality was associated with a reduced tendency to share the emotions of others (i.e., blunted emotional empathy (Guadagni et al., ). Here, we attempt to replicate our previous findings of poor sleep quality producing blunted emotional empathy, as well as to identify its possible neural correlates in a healthy young population.…”

The sleep-deprived human brain

“…Supporting this hypothesis, sleep-deprived individuals and habitually poor sleepers demonstrate impaired empathetic sensitivity, which involved sensing the emotion state of individuals in picture slides 98,99 . Sensing the internal homeostatic status of the body, and thereby tracking one’s own affective state, requires interoceptive processing within a network that includes the insula, mPFC and amygdala 100 .…”

Poor sleep quality affects spatial orientation in virtual environments

“…We then used the ISI global scores to determine participants’ group membership: individuals who had scores greater than eight, and had insomnia-like symptoms according to the ISI manual, were assigned to the poor sleep group (N=10, 5 females, mean age =20.9 years, SD age =3.0 years), and those with scores less than eight were assigned to the control group (N=14, 3 females, mean age =21.43 years, SD age =2.9 years). We decided to use such subjective measure for classifying participants’ sleep quality based on the evidence that subjective sleep measures are more sensitive to detect and define poor sleep quality as compared to actigraphy measures, particularly in subjects that lie motionless in bed [27], [28]; moreover, in a recent study we collected a variety of objective and subjective sleep measures and used a principal components analysis to provide evidence that subjective sleep measures including the ISI were the factors that best explained behavioural performance among individuals [29]. In the present study, in addition to the ISI, we calculated the global score for the PSQI by summing participants' responses from the seven subcomponents of the questionnaire; higher PSQI scores were indicative of poorer sleep quality.…”