TY - JOUR

T1 - Multimodal Emotion Recognition Is Resilient to Insufficient Sleep: Results from Cross-Sectional and Experimental Studies

AU - Holding, Benjamin C.

AU - Laukka, Petri

AU - Fischer, Håkan

AU - Bänziger, Tanja

AU - Axelsson, John

AU - Sundelin, Tina

PY - 2017/1/1

Y1 - 2017/1/1

N2 - © 2017 Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Objectives: Insufficient sleep has been associated with impaired recognition of facial emotions. However, previous studies have found inconsistent results, potentially stemming from the type of static picture task used. We therefore examined whether insufficient sleep was associated with decreased emotion recognition ability in two separate studies using a dynamic multimodal task. Methods: Study 1 used a cross-sectional design consisting of 291 participants with questionnaire measures assessing sleep duration and self-reported sleep quality for the previous night. Study 2 used an experimental design involving 181 participants where individuals were quasi-randomized into either a sleepdeprivation (N = 90) or a sleep-control (N = 91) condition. All participants from both studies were tested on the same forced-choice multimodal test of emotion recognition to assess the accuracy of emotion categorization. Results: Sleep duration, self-reported sleep quality (study 1), and sleep deprivation (study 2) did not predict overall emotion recognition accuracy or speed. Similarly, the responses to each of the twelve emotions tested showed no evidence of impaired recognition ability, apart from one positive association suggesting that greater self-reported sleep quality could predict more accurate recognition of disgust (study 1). Conclusions: The studies presented here involve considerably larger samples than previous studies and the results support the null hypotheses. Therefore, we suggest that the ability to accurately categorize the emotions of others is not associated with short-term sleep duration or sleep quality and is resilient to acute periods of insufficient sleep.

AB - © 2017 Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. Objectives: Insufficient sleep has been associated with impaired recognition of facial emotions. However, previous studies have found inconsistent results, potentially stemming from the type of static picture task used. We therefore examined whether insufficient sleep was associated with decreased emotion recognition ability in two separate studies using a dynamic multimodal task. Methods: Study 1 used a cross-sectional design consisting of 291 participants with questionnaire measures assessing sleep duration and self-reported sleep quality for the previous night. Study 2 used an experimental design involving 181 participants where individuals were quasi-randomized into either a sleepdeprivation (N = 90) or a sleep-control (N = 91) condition. All participants from both studies were tested on the same forced-choice multimodal test of emotion recognition to assess the accuracy of emotion categorization. Results: Sleep duration, self-reported sleep quality (study 1), and sleep deprivation (study 2) did not predict overall emotion recognition accuracy or speed. Similarly, the responses to each of the twelve emotions tested showed no evidence of impaired recognition ability, apart from one positive association suggesting that greater self-reported sleep quality could predict more accurate recognition of disgust (study 1). Conclusions: The studies presented here involve considerably larger samples than previous studies and the results support the null hypotheses. Therefore, we suggest that the ability to accurately categorize the emotions of others is not associated with short-term sleep duration or sleep quality and is resilient to acute periods of insufficient sleep.

KW - Emotion

KW - Emotion recognition

KW - Perception

KW - Sleep deprivation

KW - Social

UR - http://www.scopus.com/inward/record.url?scp=85044532634&partnerID=8YFLogxK

U2 - 10.1093/sleep/zsx145

DO - 10.1093/sleep/zsx145

M3 - Journal article

C2 - 28958084

AN - SCOPUS:85044532634

VL - 40

JO - Sleep (Online)

JF - Sleep (Online)

SN - 0161-8105

IS - 11

ER -