Health & body · 2014
Do people with chronic insomnia rate sad or fearful faces as less emotionally intense than good sleepers do?
Yes, in a small laboratory comparison. People with chronic insomnia and no psychiatric disorder rated sad and fearful facial expressions as less emotionally intense than age- and sex-matched good sleepers during an early-evening task. The groups did not clearly differ in identifying the emotions. This association does not show that insomnia caused the difference.
Details
Recognizing which emotion a face expresses is different from judging how strongly it expresses that emotion. Researchers compared 16 people with chronic insomnia with 15 healthy good sleepers. In an early-evening task, participants categorized faces showing anger, fear, happiness or sadness and rated the strength of each expression.
The insomnia group tended to give lower intensity ratings across the emotion categories, with clearer evidence of lower ratings specifically for sadness and fear. There was no clear group difference in categorizing the expressions, so the finding is not evidence of a general inability to recognize facial emotions.
Sleepiness measures and self-reported sleep were not reliably linked to intensity ratings. Higher anxiety and depression measures, however, were associated with lower ratings, even though participants in the insomnia group had no psychiatric disorder. This small, non-intervention study cannot establish why the groups differed or whether insomnia itself caused the difference.
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