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Lack of sleep changes our perception

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An experiment demonstrates that when we are sleep deprived, we perceive our fellow humans through different eyes.

When sleep-deprived, participants judged other people’s faces as unsightly, sickly, and less trustworthy.

This could indicate that a lack of sleep has a negative impact on social behavior: when you don’t get enough sleep, you don’t like those around you.

Sleep is necessary for both the body and the intellect. We are not just fatigued, unfocused, and angry when we don’t get enough sleep; it also impairs our pain perception, memory, and social interaction. Because people who don’t get enough sleep become less social and retreat from their peers.

Lieve van Egmond and her colleagues from Uppsala University in Sweden believe they have discovered a plausible reason why we shun our fellow humans when we are restless. They wanted to see if and how sleep deprivation affects the perception and emotional appraisal of faces and facial expressions. The 45 male and female participants each had one night with eight hours of sleep and one night without sleep.

All test subjects were given an eye tracker the next morning, which recorded their eye movements, and then showed portrait images of people with various facial expressions. Women and males with neutral, joyful, fearful, or angry expressions were visible. The participants were asked to rate how attractive, trustworthy, and healthy the faces were. The data from the eye tracker also revealed how long they spent looking at different portions of the face.

The evaluation revealed clear differences between well-rested and overslept test persons. 

“When sleep-deprived, our research subjects spent less time fixating on faces,” reports van Egmond. “Since facial expressions are crucial to understanding the emotional state of others, spending less time fixating on faces after acute sleep loss may increase the risk that you interpret the emotional state of others inaccurately or too late.”

In fact, this was confirmed in the classification tests: on average, the test persons rated the faces more negatively after a sleepless night than when they were well-rested. 

They “rated angry faces as less trustworthy ,” reports the research team. Faces with a neutral or anxious expression were rated as unattractive, while angry faces were rated as not very trustworthy.

Altered perception encourages social distancing

“The finding indicates that sleep loss is associated with more negative social impressions of others,” says senior author Christian Benedict from Uppsala University. 

Those who have not had enough sleep see their fellow human beings in a rather poor light. This is supported by previous neuroscientific studies, according to which lack of sleep changes the reaction of the amygdala – the brain area that processes and classifies our own feelings, but also emotional stimuli from the outside.

According to the research team, this could explain why we make more negative judgments about those around us when we don’t get enough sleep. 

“This could result in less motivation to interact socially,” Benedict continues.

Image Credit: Getty

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