Mind and behavior · 1 min read
After one night without sleep, it was harder to calm reactions to distressing images
In a lab, 60 adults stayed awake overnight or rested. The difference disappeared after accounting for mood and sleepiness.
The study, in plain language
Feeling an emotion and trying to regulate it are different tasks. In a sleep laboratory, some adults stayed awake overnight while others rested. They then completed attention, memory, and emotion-regulation tasks using images.
The group that did not sleep had more difficulty reducing its response to negative images when asked. That difference disappeared after accounting for mood or sleepiness. Other emotional-perception tasks did not show the same pattern, although there were more attention lapses and slower responses.
The key idea
After a sleepless night, regulating the response to negative images was harder, although the difference disappeared after accounting for mood and fatigue.
Something to think about
When you sleep poorly, notice what changes: your mood, fatigue, or reactions? In this study, the difficulty calming a response was no longer apparent after accounting for how people felt and how sleepy they were.
The original study
Total sleep deprivation reduces top-down regulation of emotion without altering bottom-up affective processing
Source under CC BY 4.0. English adaptation and explanation by PaperFlow, with AI assistance. The text has been reorganized for a general audience; it is not the complete paper and does not imply endorsement by its authors.
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