Summary: Researchers report that insufficient sleep affects children’s emotional well-being not only by increasing negative feelings but also by changing how they experience and remember positive emotions.
Source: University of Houston
NIH-funded study reveals long-term emotional effects of poor sleep.
Most people describe sleep loss in familiar terms: grumpy, foggy, short-tempered. While those descriptions capture common short-term effects, chronic sleep disruption in childhood can have more serious, long-lasting consequences than momentary irritability or trouble concentrating.
Candice Alfano, a clinical psychologist and associate professor of psychology at the University of Houston, explains that children who regularly get inadequate or fragmented sleep are at higher risk for developing anxiety and depressive disorders later in life. Supported by a grant from the NIH’s National Institute of Mental Health (NIMH), Alfano’s study is designed to identify exactly how insufficient sleep in childhood contributes to greater emotional vulnerability.
“We want to understand how children evaluate, express, regulate and later recall emotional experiences when their sleep is sufficient compared with when it is insufficient,” said Alfano, principal investigator of the study and director of the Sleep and Anxiety Center of Houston (SACH). “We focus on childhood because sleep patterns and emotional habits develop early and can persist over time.”
Alfano and co-investigator Cara Palmer, a postdoctoral fellow at SACH, are isolating specific emotional processes that become disrupted by poor sleep and that could increase the risk for anxiety and depression. As part of the experimental protocol, the researchers temporarily restricted sleep in a group of 50 pre-adolescent children, ages 7 to 11, to observe cognitive, behavioral and physiological changes in emotional processing.
The study’s results show that inadequate sleep affects children in two important ways: it increases negative emotional responses and it blunts positive emotional experiences. After only two nights of restricted sleep, children reported less pleasure from positive events, showed reduced emotional reactivity to positive stimuli, and later recalled fewer details from positive experiences. By contrast, when children slept their normal, adequate amount, these dampening effects on positive emotion were markedly reduced.
“Healthy sleep is essential for children’s psychological health,” Alfano said. “Persistent sleep insufficiency can contribute to the onset of depression, anxiety and other emotional problems. Parents should treat sleep as a fundamental part of overall health—alongside nutrition, dental care and physical activity. If a child struggles to wake up in the morning or feels drowsy during the day, their night sleep is likely not restorative. Causes range from late bedtimes and inconsistent schedules to non-restful sleep during the night.”
Alfano emphasizes that studying the connection between sleep disruption and problematic emotional processing in childhood is crucial because both sleep and emotion-regulation systems are developing during these years. Children require more sleep and have higher brain plasticity, making early life a pivotal window for intervention. Given the high societal costs associated with anxiety and depressive disorders—estimated in the tens of billions annually—the need to identify early risk factors and effective preventative strategies is urgent.
Palmer and Alfano recently reviewed the scientific literature on sleep and emotion regulation in the journal Sleep Medicine Reviews to help shape the methods used in their NIH study. Their review highlights evidence that insufficient sleep reduces the likelihood of engaging in effortful positive or rewarding activities—such as socializing or pursuing leisure interests—which over time can lead to increased risk for depression and a lower overall quality of life.
“Multiple emotional processes appear vulnerable to poor sleep,” Alfano said. “Sleep loss impairs our ability to monitor ourselves, interpret others’ nonverbal cues and accurately identify emotions. Combined with decreased impulse control—which is common during adolescence—sleep deprivation can create a ‘perfect storm’ for negative emotional outcomes and harmful consequences.”
SACH is a clinical research center within the UH Department of Psychology that focuses on helping children, adolescents and adults manage and overcome sleep and emotion-related problems. In addition to conducting research, the center provides low-cost clinical services for families and is actively recruiting participants for several studies, including the NIH-funded study on sleep loss and emotion and other projects examining the impact of military deployment on children and families.
Funding: NIH/National Institute of Mental Health.
Source: Lisa Merkl, University of Houston
Image source: Image credited to Thomas Campbell.
Original research: Palmer, C. A., & Alfano, C. A., “Sleep and emotion regulation: An organizing, integrative review,” Sleep Medicine Reviews. Published online January 14, 2016. doi:10.1016/j.smrv.2015.12.006
Sleep and emotion regulation: An organizing, integrative review
Accumulating research shows that disrupted sleep is a strong risk factor for a variety of psychiatric conditions. Emotion regulation is a key explanatory mechanism linking sleep to psychological health, but the broad and multifaceted nature of emotion regulation creates conceptual and empirical challenges. Much prior work has focused on emotions that arise after sleep loss rather than on the regulatory processes that shape those emotions. This review applies the process model of emotion regulation to organize findings about how sleep affects different stages of emotional experience and regulation. Evidence points to maladaptive changes in emotion at multiple stages of the generation and regulation process. The authors call for targeted experimental research to identify which parts of the emotion regulation process are most sensitive to sleep loss, along with longitudinal studies to track how these processes relate to the development of psychopathology.