Total sleep deprivation reduces top-down regulation of emotion without altering bottom-up affective processing

Abstract

Sleep loss is reported to influence affective processing, causing changes in overall mood and altering emotion regulation. These aspects of affective processing are seldom investigated together, making it difficult to determine whether total sleep deprivation has a global effect on how affective stimuli and emotions are processed, or whether specific components of affective processing are affected selectively. Sixty healthy adults were recruited for an in-laboratory study and, after a monitored night of sleep and laboratory acclimation, randomly assigned to either a total sleep deprivation condition (n = 40) or a rested control condition (n = 20). Measurements of mood, vigilant attention to affective stimuli, affective working memory, affective categorization, and emotion regulation were taken for both groups. With one exception, measures of interest were administered twice: once at baseline and again 24 hours later, after the sleep deprived group had spent a night awake (working memory was assessed only after total sleep deprivation). Sleep deprived individuals experienced an overall reduction in positive affect with no significant change in negative affect. Despite the substantial decline in positive affect, there was no evidence that processing affectively valenced information was biased under total sleep deprivation. Sleep deprived subjects did not rate affective stimuli differently from rested subjects, nor did they show sleep deprivation-specific effects of affect type on vigilant attention, working memory, and categorization tasks. However, sleep deprived subjects showed less effective regulation of negative emotion. Overall, we found no evidence that total sleep deprivation biased the processing of affective stimuli in general. By contrast, total sleep deprivation appeared to reduce controlled processing required for emotion regulation.

Working around the Clock: Is a Person’s Endogenous Circadian Timing for Optimal Neurobehavioral Functioning Inherently Task-Dependent?

“…The so-called “task impurity problem” implies that any neurobehavioral task involves a number of interrelated cognitive processes that must be dissociable and distinguished to be able to interpret which, if any, of these processes are differentially affected by circadian rhythmicity [ 40 , 70 ]. Based on dissociations demonstrated in recent sleep deprivation studies, neurobehavioral (or cognitive) functions of particular interest for future studies may include attentional control [ 71 ], memory binding [ 72 ] and maintenance [ 73 ], and emotion regulation [ 74 ]. Referring to the sleep deprivation literature is relevant here, because our results indicate that the differences we observed in the overall temporal profiles of the KSS, DSST, and PVT with the circadian and homeostatic processes still intertwined ( Figure 3 ) are attributable at least in part to differences between neurobehavioral functions in the influence of time awake through the homeostatic process.…”

Electrodermal Activity Is Sensitive to Sleep Deprivation but Does Not Moderate the Effect of Total Sleep Deprivation on Affect

“…It would be of interest to investigate whether TSD would alter EDA and experienced emotion responses to emotional induction stimuli (cf. Franzen et al, 2008;Stenson et al, 2021).…”

“…Valence and arousal are deliberately intertwined on this instrument (Watson and Tellegen, 1985 ). The PANAS shows good internal consistency and construct validity (Watson et al, 1988 ; Crawford and Henry, 2004 ) and has been previously used to assess changes in self-reported mood during TSD (Franzen et al, 2008 ; Riedy et al, 2013 ; Stenson et al, 2021 ).…”

“…Multiple sources of evidence demonstrate that insufficient sleep alters the experience of emotion. Sleep loss has been found to decrease positive mood (Pilcher and Huffcutt, 1996 ; Dinges et al, 1997 ) and increase negative mood states (Scott et al, 2006 ; Kahn-Greene et al, 2007 ), and has been linked to difficulties in regulating emotion (Lustig et al, 2021 ; Lustig, 2021 ; Stenson et al, 2021 ). The experience of emotion is characterized by affective valence (positive/negative) and by the level of arousal (how intensely an affective state is experienced; Russell, 1980 ; Posner et al, 2005 ).…”

“…To clarify the relationship between physiological arousal and emotional states during sleep deprivation, we gathered data from three in-laboratory sleep deprivation protocols on which we have previously published (e.g., Whitney et al, 2017 ; Honn et al, 2019 ; Lawrence-Sidebottom et al, 2020 ; Kurinec et al, 2021 ; Stenson et al, 2021 ). With these data, which formed one of the largest samples used in an investigation of total sleep deprivation (TSD) and EDA, we investigated the relationship between EDA, as measured by NSSCR frequency and SCL, to experienced emotion, operationalized as self-reported affect, under TSD.…”