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Lack of sleep affects one’s comprehension of emotional cues

Written by: David Castillo on March 3rd, 2010

Lack of sleep affects one’s comprehension of emotional cues | read this item

Lack of sleep disrupts a person’s capacity to function. It affects an individual’s cognitive abilities, behavioral abilities, and even a person’s reaction time while he/she is driving. But that’s not all that that it can affect.

In a recent study, lack of sleep was linked to a person’s failure to distinguish between facial expressions of others—specifically, they can’t determine whether they are happy or angry.

As explained in Psychology Today: “In this study, 20 people were deprived of sleep for thirty hours, and then asked to look at photographs of faces, each displaying a different emotional state (happy, sad, and angry) at various levels of intensity. They were then allowed to sleep, and re-tested 24 hours later. The responses from both days were compared, as well as to those of another group of 17 people who served as controls, undergoing the same testing two days in a row without sleep deprivation.”

The researchers said that there was a significant blunting in the ability of the sleep deprived test patients. The difference disappeared after the patients recovered sleep, and was greater in women compared to men.

The experiment highlights another disadvantage for sleep deprived individuals.

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