RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Sleep restriction caused impaired emotional regulation without detectable brain activation changes – a functional magnetic resonance imaging study
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 436048
DO 10.1101/436048
A1 Sandra Tamm
A1 Gustav Nilsonne
A1 Johanna Schwarz
A1 Armita Golkar
A1 Göran Kecklund
A1 Predrag Petrovic
A1 Håkan Fischer
A1 Torbjörn Åkerstedt
A1 Mats Lekander
YR 2018
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2018/10/05/436048.abstract
AB 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 here aimed to investigate the effect of 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 (3h). Emotional downregulation was associated with significantly increased activity in 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.