Sleep Deprivation and Threat Evaluation!

Emergency personnel, soldiers, physicians and police officers often have to make split second decisions and evaluations of threatening situations; and how they evaluate it can affect their response.

In a recent study, researchers had study subjects look at threatening and non-threatening faces after a full nights sleep, or after being awake for a prolonged time. They used physiological measurements and functional MRI to evaluate how threatened the person felt.

Significantly more faces were identified as threatening and fewer as nonthreatening after sleep deprivation than after rest, and this was associated with changes in areas of the brain associated with such an emotional response.

The need for adequate sleep to reset our threat recognition could have interesting and important implications, especially when we are seeing questionable police shootings and "stand your ground" defenses!

Goldstein-Piekarski AN et al. J Neurosci 2015 Jul 15