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Sleep Deprivation
Not getting enough sleep is turning out more and more to be a bad
practice overall for your health physically and mentally. Direct
connections between emotions and cognition have been recognized in
relation to sleep time.
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Sleep Deprivation Affects Moral Judgment, Journal SLEEP
1 March 2007 - medicalnewstoday.com
Research has shown that bad sleep can adversely affect a
person's physical health and emotional well-being. However, the amount
of sleep one gets can also influence his or her decision-making. A
study published in the March 1st issue of the journal SLEEP finds that
sleep deprivation impairs the ability to integrate emotion and
cognition to guide moral judgments.
The study, conducted by William D.S. Killgore, PhD, and colleagues at
the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research, was focused on 26 healthy
adults, who made judgments about the "appropriateness" of various
courses of action in response to three types of moral dilemmas on two
separate occasions: at rested baseline and again following 53 hours of
continuous wakefulness.
Compared to baseline, sleep deprivation resulted in significantly
longer response latencies (suggesting greater difficulty deciding upon
a course of action) for moral personal dilemmas. The findings suggest
that continuous wakefulness has a particularly debilitating effect on
judgment and decision making processes that depend heavily upon the
integration of emotion with cognition, said Killgore, adding that the
results provide further support to the hypothesis that sleep loss is
particularly disruptive to the ventromedial prefrontal regions of the
brain, which are important for the integration of affect and cognition
in the service of judgment and decision making.
"Most of us are confronted with moral dilemmas nearly every day,
although the majority of these choices are minor and of little
consequence," said Killgore. "Although such decisions are inextricably
steeped in social, emotional, religious and moral values, and their
correct courses of action cannot be determined through scientific
inquiry, it is well within the realm of science to ask how the brain
goes about solving such dilemmas and what factors, whether internal or
external to the individual, contribute to the judgments and decisions
that are ultimately reached."
According to Dr. Killgore, these findings do not suggest that sleep
deprivation leads to a decline in "morality" or in the quality of
moral beliefs, but a latency to respond and the change in the leniency
or permissiveness of response style as evidenced by the tendency to
decide that particular courses of action were "appropriate" before and
after sleep loss.
"Our results simply suggest that when sleep deprived, individuals
appear to be selectively slower in their deliberations about moral
personal dilemmas relative to other types of dilemmas," said Killgore.
The present findings may have implications for those in occupations
that frequently require periods of extended sleep loss and in which
real-world moral dilemmas may be encountered (e.g., emergency medical
services, military personnel in combat, fire/rescue workers), noted
Killgore. When sleep deprived, such personnel may experience greater
difficulty reaching morally based decisions under emotionally
evocative circumstances and may be prone to choosing courses of action
that differ from those that they would have chosen in a fully rested
state, added Killgore.
Experts recommend that adults get seven-to-eight hours of sleep on a
nightly basis.
Those who think they might have a sleep disorder are urged to discuss
their problem with their primary care physician, who will issue a
referral to a sleep specialist.
Comment: Find out what your problems are
first, and then start sleeping more. You can determine this using good
judgment and save money. You do not want to be referred to death.
SLEEP is the official journal of the
Associated Professional Sleep Societies, LLC, a joint venture of the
AASM and the Sleep Research Society.
http://www.SleepEducation.com, a Web site maintained by the AASM,
provides information about the various sleep disorders that exist, the
forms of treatment available, recent news on the topic of sleep, sleep
studies that have been conducted and a listing of sleep facilities.
http://www.aasmnet.org
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