35% of adults in the United States sleep less than 7 hours per night.Although several reports suggest that lack of sleep influences our emotional state, a new study published in the Journal of Sleep Research has formalized this.In the study, participants looked at “pleasant and neutral images” after 5 nights of normal sleep and 5 nights of restricted sleep.
The results showed that the participants were more likely to have negative responses to these images after the periods of disturbed sleep than after normal sleep.The authors conclude that lack of sleep imposes a negative emotional bias on people and has important implications for daily life, as well as in clinic settings.Numerous studies have investigated the behavioral effects of lack.