Abstract
Despite complaints of difficulties in waking socioemotional functioning by individuals with insomnia, only a few studies have investigated emotion processing performance in this group. Additionally, the role of sleep in socioemotional processing has not been investigated extensively nor using quantitative measures of sleep. Individuals with insomnia symptoms (n = 14) and healthy good sleepers (n = 15) completed two nights of at-home polysomnography, followed by an afternoon of in-lab performance testing on tasks measuring the processing of emotional facial expressions. The insomnia group self-reported less total sleep time, but no other group differences in sleep or task performance were observed. Greater beta EEG power throughout the night was associated with higher intensity ratings of happy, fearful and sad faces for individuals with insomnia, yet blunted sensitivity and lower accuracy for good sleepers. Thus, the presence of hyperarousal differentially impacted socioemotional processing of faces in individuals with insomnia symptoms and good sleepers.
Highlights
The capacity to function well in daytime life is dependent on a night of quality sleep.Approximately 10%–15% of the population suffers from chronic poor sleep due to insomnia, a chronic condition characterized by difficulty initiating and/or maintaining sleep [1,2,3,4]
Group comparisons of participant characteristics revealed that the INS group compared to the good sleeper (GS) group had significantly greater complaints of insomnia severity and poor historic sleep quality indicated by greater scores on the Insomnia Severity Index (ISI) (t(18.20) = −6.65, p < 0.001), and PSQI (t(25) = −11.80, p < 0.001)
There was a significant interaction between Group and right-frontal beta on intensity ratings for Fearful faces, b = 1.09, t = 2.97, p = 0.007
Summary
The capacity to function well in daytime life is dependent on a night of quality sleep.Approximately 10%–15% of the population suffers from chronic poor sleep due to insomnia, a chronic condition characterized by difficulty initiating and/or maintaining sleep [1,2,3,4]. Insomnia leads to daytime performance deficits in cognitive abilities such as memory, attention, and concentration, and several of these performance deficits have been linked to poor sleep [5,6,7,8,9,10,11]. Another feature of insomnia is reports of reduced social engagement [12,13,14], suggesting that one consequence of insomnia is poor social functioning. Little research has examined the processing of socioemotional content in patients with insomnia, despite complaints of daytime impairment in these areas (e.g., [12,15]), and the literature showing that both experimental sleep deprivation and insomnia lead to alterations and/or impairments in emotion processing (for reviews, see [16,17]).
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