Sleep deprivation selectively enhances interpersonal emotion recognition from dynamic facial expressions at long viewing times: An observational study

Publication date: Available online 17 October 2018Source: Neuroscience LettersAuthor(s): Benjamin Sack, Katja Broer, Silke AndersAbstractObservational and experimental studies have shown that sleep deprivation disinhibits emotional responses to disturbing and rewarding external events. On the other hand, most studies on sleep deprivation and interpersonal emotion recognition report that sensitivity to others’ emotions is dampened after sleep deprivation. This is at odds with current neuroscientific theories of social cognition that assume that affective experiences and emotion recognition in others are closely tied at the neural and physiological level. In this behavioural study we show that sleep deprivation can actually increase emotion recognition accuracy from dynamically unfolding facial expressions if they are viewed sufficiently long. Participants viewed 2-4 s or 8-10 s video clips of female senders who facially communicated anger, disgust, fear or sadness to their romantic partner and evaluated the sender’s affective state in a forced-choice paradigm, either during sleep deprivation after a night shift (N = 40) or after normal night sleep (N = 50). All participants showed a significant increase in emotion recognition accuracy from 2-4 s to 8-10 s stimulus presentation times. Emotion recognition accuracy did not differ between sleep-deprived and control participants for 2-4 s videos, but sleep-deprived participants showed significantly higher emot...
Source: Neuroscience Letters - Category: Neuroscience Source Type: research