The Effect of Sleep Loss on Emotion Regulation

Overview

The study is designed to investigate the impact of three nights of sleep restricted to 4 hours per night, on the processing and regulation of emotional information compared to Insomnia Disorder and control. The investigators will address and attempt to answer two questions. (i) How do three nights of reduced sleep or a diagnosis of Insomnia Disorder affect the processing and regulation of emotional information compared to typical, undisturbed sleep? (ii) What overlapping and distinct neural mechanisms are engaged and associated with behavioral effects when attempting to process and regulate emotions in a sleep restricted state or with a clinical diagnosis of Insomnia Disorder? This study will investigate sleep's role in emotion processing and regulation. The findings will help further understanding of the role of sleep in healthy emotional functioning.

Goal 1: How does sleep loss and clinical sleep disruption (i.e. Insomnia Disorder) impact emotion perception and emotion regulation? The investigators are interested in how chronic loss of sleep, either through artificially restricting sleep or clinically related sleep disturbance, impairs our ability to properly perceive and regulate our responses to emotional information using various emotion regulation strategies. There has been research on the effect of sleep loss on broad areas of cognition, such as attention, working memory, and reasoning ability, but the impact of long-term sleep loss on emotional processing and regulation remains largely unexplored. The investigators aim to characterize how sleep loss via experimentally reduced sleep in healthy control participants or clinical sleep disturbance in patients with Insomnia Disorder, affects the ability to accurately perceive emotion. Investigators will also investigate how it alters the intensity with which emotions are perceived, and the effect that these changes have on the ability to regulate emotional responses to these stimuli compared to healthy control participants that are allowed undisturbed sleep. Goal 2: How are changes in subjective emotional responses reflected in the neural signal and psychophysiological measures? The investigators will utilize fMRI and measures of autonomic reactivity (heart rate and skin conductance) to characterize the neural and psychophysiological responses that are associated with behavioral changes following sleep restriction or in patients with Insomnia disorder compared to healthy sleep control participants.