Speaker
Description
Short periods of sleep restriction have been found to alleviate symptoms of depression. Among other manifestations, depression is characterized by anhedonia, a lack of enjoyment from life’s experiences. According to this, individuals with depressive symptoms may exhibit less frequent or reduced reactions to positive emotional stimuli, performing paradoxically better in emotion suppression tasks. Recent evidence suggests that after short sleep periods, potentially indicating a state of sleep restriction, healthy people show higher rates of emotion suppression failures than after long sleep periods. Based on these premises, we hypothesize that the impact of sleep restriction on emotion suppression performance will correlate with the individual’s level of depression. To test this, participants will be shown amusing videos and will be instructed to maintain a neutral expression while their faces will be recorded. Smiling will be considered a failure in emotion suppression. Each participant will complete the task twice: once after a full night of sleep, and again after sleeping 50% of their usual amount. Prior to the first experimental session, they will fill in questionnaires assessing depressive symptoms and empathy. Comparing each participant’s performances between the two experimental conditions, we expect to observe an effect of sleep restriction on participants’ ability to regulate their emotional reactions. Also, analyzing the performances and questionnaires’ scores we will determine whether there is a correlation between emotion suppression failures and depressive traits. This study is pre-registered and may help our understanding of how sleep restriction affects depression, as the extent of this relationship is still unclear.
| If you're submitting a poster, would you be interested in giving a blitz talk? | Yes |
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| If you're submitting a symposium, or a talk that is part of a symposium, is this a junior symposium? | No |
