Abstract
Sleep restriction has been proposed to cause impaired emotional processing and emotional regulation by inhibiting top-down control from prefrontal cortex to amygdala. Intentional emotional regulation after sleep restriction has, however, never been studied using brain imaging. We aimed here to investigate the effect of partial sleep restriction on emotional regulation through cognitive reappraisal. Forty-seven young (age 20–30) and 33 older (age 65–75) participants (38/23 with complete data and successful sleep intervention) performed a cognitive reappraisal task during fMRI after a night of normal sleep and after restricted sleep (3 h). Emotional downregulation was associated with significantly increased activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (pFWE < 0.05) and lateral orbital cortex (pFWE < 0.05) in young, but not in older subjects. Sleep restriction was associated with a decrease in self-reported regulation success to negative stimuli (p < 0.01) and a trend towards perceiving all stimuli as less negative (p = 0.07) in young participants. No effects of sleep restriction on brain activity nor connectivity were found in either age group. In conclusion, our data do not support the idea of a prefrontal-amygdala disconnect after sleep restriction, and neural mechanisms underlying behavioural effects on emotional regulation after insufficient sleep require further investigation.
Highlights
Adequate sleep is important for emotional functioning, as indicated by a number of experimental studies and associations between sleep disturbance and mood disorders demonstrated in epidemiological studies [2,3,4]
This study aimed primarily to investigate whether sleep restricted to 3 h affects emotional regulation through cognitive reappraisal in healthy adults on subjective ratings, brain activity measured with fMRI and psychophysiological outcomes
Sleep restriction was associated with more sleepiness, compared to the full sleep condition ( p, 0.001, table 1), confirming the effect of the sleep manipulation
Summary
Adequate sleep is important for emotional functioning, as indicated by a number of experimental studies (reviewed in [1]) and associations between sleep disturbance and mood disorders demonstrated in epidemiological studies [2,3,4]. Along these lines, increased emotional reactivity to negative emotional stimuli after experimental sleep deprivation has been shown in earlier studies [5,6,7]. We here report a study where the effect of sleep restriction on cognitive reappraisal was tested in both younger and older subjects, motivated by observations that vulnerability to sleep deprivation, as well as emotional and cognitive functioning, change during an adult’s lifetime [12,13,14,15]
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