The Effect Of Sleep Deprivation On Individual Attentional Deployment And Appraisal To Emotional Stimulus

Background: Sleep plays a considerable role in maintaining emotional system function.Over the past half century,researches proved that sleep deprivation impaired a series of cognitive brain function,including attention vigilant,reaction speed,learning and memory,execution and decision-making ability etc.However,the impact of sleep deprivation on emotional processing has received considerably less research interest.In clinical trials,nearly all psychiatric and neurological mood disorders express co-occurring abnormalities of sleep,and negative mood increasing always fellows sleep loss,while negative affective event could change sleep structure.Emotion regulation involves the interaction of subcortical brain structures of the limbic system(e.g.amygdala)that generate emotional responses to stimuli with control centers(e.g.,prefrontal cortex)that regulate emotional responses and behavior.Given that the brain structures and neurochemicals involved in the regulation of emotion also govern sleep.An intimate relationship between these two domains of functioning is intuitive.According to the process model,emotional processing involves situations-attention-appraisal – response.Current sleep and emotion studies mainly focused on the effect of sleep loss on individual emotional responses,while few studies take the process of attention and appraisal into consideration.And results among these studies vary,even some studies get the opposite conclusion.Object: To investigate the effect of sleep deprivation on the attentional deployment and appraisal,elucidate the effect of sleep in emotional processing,and predict and control the change of individual psychological process after sleep deprivation.Methods: The research methods of this study include three parts: using dot-detexting task and visual search task to investigate the feature of individual attentional deployment to emotional stimulus,using rapid serial visual presentation task to investigate the feature of individual attentional deployment to emotional stimulus and using evaluation task to investigate the feature of appraisal to emotional stimulation.Randomized control design was selected.All participants were randomly assigned to sleep deprivation group and control group.Sleep deprivation group was given one night of sleep deprivation(10:00 pm –6:30 am),the sleep control group kept sleep.On the next day,participants were asked to complete some experimental task.Dot-detecting task,visual search task and rapid serial visual presentation task were employed to investigate the effect of sleep deprivation on attentional deployment,and emotional pictures evaluation task was selected to investigate the effect of sleep deprivation on appraisal by comparing the differences of sleep deprivation group and sleep control group.Result1.Reaction time was less when the affective picture and dot were in the same side,however there is no significant difference between the two groups;2.In the visual search task,the two groups were faster when searching target snake than searching target flower,but there was no significant difference between the two groups(p <0.01).3.When T1 was anger face,the correct rate of T2 was lower than that of normal sleep group(p <0.01).Compared with normal sleep group,sleep deprivation group decreased the overall alertness(p <0.05),sleep deprivation group showed difficulty in lifting attention to the threat of emotional face;4.In the emotional stimulus subjective evaluation task,the effect of sleep deprivation on positive and negative pictures evaluation was not significant,but the valence rating of neutral picture seems tend to a negative bias,while there was no significant difference before and after sleep for control group(p = 0.12)Conclusion 1.Sleep deprivation affects the individual attentional deployment to emotional stimulus 2.Sleep plays an important role in the emotional appraisal process.One night sleep deprivation does not seem to affect the individual subjective assessment of emotional stimulation,but can lead to negative bias in the individual assessment of neutral stimuli.