Tired and wired: sleep deprivation prevents emotional adaptation to prolonged and ambiguous threat
Sullivan, E. C.; McCall, C.; Croissant, M.; Henderson, L.; Schofield, G.; Cairney, S.
Show abstract
Sleep deprivation amplifies emotional reactivity to brief, overt threats in the external environment. However, its effects on emotional responses to prolonged, ambiguous threat remain unclear. In this pre-registered study, we combined virtual reality, psychophysiology and multidimensional experience sampling to test the hypothesis that sleep deprivation disrupts emotional adaptation to sustained or resolving threat. Following a night of restful sleep or total sleep deprivation, healthy young adults navigated an immersive virtual world that alternated between ambiguously threatening and non-threatening contexts. Despite initial increases in emotional arousal, sleep-rested individuals quickly downregulated affective responses to ambiguous threat, reflecting efficient adaptation to the aversive virtual environment. Sleep-deprived individuals, by contrast, were unable to overturn elevated arousal responses, and exhibited a breakdown of goal-orientated, emotional control. Interestingly, resting heart rate variability, an index of affective regulatory capacity, mitigated arousal responses to ambiguous threat after sleep deprivation. These findings suggest that insufficient sleep prevents an adaptive renormalisation of emotional arousal during prolonged and ambiguous threat, giving rise to a maladaptive state of anxiety.
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