Elsevier

Sleep Medicine

Volume 9, Issue 5, July 2008, Pages 517-526
Sleep Medicine

Original Article
Sleep deprivation reduces perceived emotional intelligence and constructive thinking skills

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.sleep.2007.07.003Get rights and content

Abstract

Background and purpose

Insufficient sleep can adversely affect a variety of cognitive abilities, ranging from simple alertness to higher-order executive functions. Although the effects of sleep loss on mood and cognition are well documented, there have been no controlled studies examining its effects on perceived emotional intelligence (EQ) and constructive thinking, abilities that require the integration of affect and cognition and are central to adaptive functioning.

Patients and methods

Twenty-six healthy volunteers completed the Bar-On Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQi) and the Constructive Thinking Inventory (CTI) at rested baseline and again after 55.5 and 58 h of continuous wakefulness, respectively.

Results

Relative to baseline, sleep deprivation was associated with lower scores on Total EQ (decreased global emotional intelligence), Intrapersonal functioning (reduced self-regard, assertiveness, sense of independence, and self-actualization), Interpersonal functioning (reduced empathy toward others and quality of interpersonal relationships), Stress Management skills (reduced impulse control and difficulty with delay of gratification), and Behavioral Coping (reduced positive thinking and action orientation). Esoteric Thinking (greater reliance on formal superstitions and magical thinking processes) was increased.

Conclusions

These findings are consistent with the neurobehavioral model suggesting that sleep loss produces temporary changes in cerebral metabolism, cognition, emotion, and behavior consistent with mild prefrontal lobe dysfunction.

Introduction

Insufficient sleep can have deleterious effects on personal health, cognitive performance, and safety [1], [2], [3]. Without adequate sleep, individuals show significant impairment in a variety of cognitive abilities, most notably including simple alertness, vigilance, attention, and concentration [4], [5], [6], [7], [8]. There is also evidence suggesting that sleep loss can adversely affect a variety of higher-order cognitive processes, including problem-solving [9], inhibitory control [10], [11], and complex decision-making [12], [13], [14], although there continues to be debate on this subject and findings for executive function tasks have not always been consistent [15], [16], [17], [18]. Many of these higher-order capacities are believed to be mediated by the prefrontal cortex [19], a complex region of the brain that appears to be particularly affected by prolonged wakefulness [20], [21], [22].

Perhaps because logical reasoning has long been considered to be the foundation of human rationality [23], the field of sleep deprivation research has focused primarily on the logical, rational, and purely mechanistic aspects of intellectual and cognitive performance (e.g., working memory, concentration, logical processing, set shifting, etc.). However, emerging evidence suggests that effective human judgment and decision-making involves more than dispassionate logic and rational intellect [24], [25]. While traditional forms of cognitive intelligence are critical to the ability to adapt and survive, most individuals that succeed in modern society demonstrate a number of other capacities as well. Successful individuals are able to regulate their own emotional behaviors in constructive ways, are adept at utilizing their affective processes to guide their judgments and streamline their decision-making, are skilled at identifying and understanding the emotional needs of others, and are effective at acting upon this information in pro-social and self-enhancing ways [26], [27], [28]. Such people are said to think and act in constructive ways [29] and demonstrate qualities of “emotional intelligence” [30].

It has been suggested that emotional intelligence abilities, including self-awareness, interpersonal skills, and adaptive coping skills, are related to better adjustment, and may be as important, if not more so, to a variety of successful life outcomes than traditional cognitive intelligence [30]. In fact, it has been observed that formally measured intellectual capacity is often not the best predictor of many aspects integral to successful living. For example, measures of adjustment including job success, relationship satisfaction, and mental health have been shown to not be significantly associated with intellectual ability [31], [32]. Rather, individuals that show a combination of adaptive problem-solving and emotional and behavioral coping skills appear to be the most successful when faced with highly stressful experiences, a set of skills that have been described as “Constructive Thinking” [29]. Epstein and Meier conceptualize Constructive Thinking as the habitual thought processes that help a person construe and respond to events adaptively and with minimal stress [29]. Because emotionally intelligent individuals are attuned to the subtle nuances of emotions in others and in themselves and can use this information to facilitate effective judgment and streamline decision-making [28], they would also be expected to rely heavily on the emotional and behavioral coping skills involved in constructive thinking.

There is accumulating evidence that a significant proportion of the variance in Emotional Intelligence is rooted in neurobiology. The ability to integrate emotional information with cognitive processing appears to require the interaction of several key brain regions, particularly the ventromedial prefrontal cortex, the insular cortex, and the amygdala [33]. These three brain regions comprise a neural system that integrates emotional states, prior learning, and conscious cognition to guide decision-making [24], [25]. Of these regions, the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is thought to function as the critical integrator of emotional and cognitive information in the service of decision-making [34], [35]. Despite relatively normal levels of cognitive intelligence, patients with damage to the ventromedial prefrontal cortex often exhibit profound impairments in social judgment and deficits in emotionally based decision-making [24], [25], [34], [36]. Thus, dysfunction within the ventromedial prefrontal cortex is associated with impaired emotional intelligence and poor constructive thinking processes, while intact functioning of this region allows the individual to cope flexibly with changing demands.

Interestingly, the prefrontal cortex appears to be particularly sensitive to the effects of sleep loss, with significant declines in metabolic activity evident following as few as 24 h of continuous wakefulness [22], [37]. Functionally, the prefrontal cortex appears to become less efficient at neural processing during prolonged sleep deprivation [38], [39], necessitating the recruitment of additional brain regions to compensate for these deficiencies [40], [41], [42]. Likewise, tests of complex cognitive functions mediated by the prefrontal region often show decrements in performance after one to two nights of sleep loss [20], [21]. This appears to be particularly true for tasks requiring divergent thinking and mental flexibility [43] rather than novel logic-based executive function tasks such as the Wisconsin Card Sorting Test [15], [16]. Recent findings suggest that deficits in emotional decision-making [13], inhibitory control [44], mood regulation [45], [46], moral judgment [47], and responses to frustration [48] also emerge after sleep deprivation. These findings suggest that it is not only pure cognitive abilities that are affected by sleep loss, but also affective functions that are central to personality and social interaction, capacities that are likely to play a central role in emotional intelligence. To address this more directly, the effects of two nights of sleep loss were examined on two well-validated commercially available tests of perceived emotional intelligence and constructive thinking skills. The tests were administered at rested baseline and again following 55.5 h of continuous wakefulness. It was hypothesized that sleep deprivation would produce significant declines in perceived emotional intelligence and constructive thinking scores.

Section snippets

Participants

Twenty-six healthy military volunteers (21 males and 5 females) participated in a larger investigation of the effects of caffeine on psychomotor vigilance. The participants ranged in age from 20 to 35 years (mean [M] = 25.3, standard deviation [SD] = 4.1) and had an average of 14.1 years of education (SD = 1.6). Other data from this sample of volunteers have been presented elsewhere [48], [49], [50], although the results reported herein represent novel and never before published findings about

Perceived emotional intelligence

First, to provide an evaluation of changes in response set as a function of sleep deprivation, several validity and response indices were compared across sessions. No significant change was found for Omissions, Inconsistency Index, Positive Impression Scale, or Negative Impression Scale of the EQi between baseline and sleep-deprived sessions (all p-values > .05), suggesting that the data from the EQi are valid and interpretable. Overall, Total EQ scores declined significantly as a function of

Discussion

Sleep deprivation produced statistically significant declines in several facets of perceived emotional intelligence and some aspects of subjectively assessed constructive thinking skills, including reduced self-reports of intrapersonal awareness, interpersonal functioning, stress management, and behavioral coping skills as well as an elevation in esoteric thought processes. The present scales were subjective in nature and may simply reflect the participant’s own self-perception of declines in

Acknowledgments

This material has been reviewed by the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research and there is no objection to its publication or presentation. The views expressed in this article are those of the authors and do not reflect the official policy or position of the Department of the Army, the Department of Defense, the US Government, or any of the institutions with which the authors are affiliated.

References (85)

  • E.T. Kahn-Greene et al.

    Sleep deprivation adversely affects interpersonal responses to frustration

    Pers Indiv Differ

    (2006)
  • E.J. Austin et al.

    Measurement of trait emotional intelligence: testing and cross-validating a modified version of Schutte et al. (1998) measure

    Pers Indiv Differ

    (2004)
  • D. Dawda et al.

    Assessing emotional intelligence: reliability and validity of the Bar-On Emotional Quotient Inventory (EQi) in university students

    Pers Indiv Differ

    (2000)
  • T.L. Whitsett et al.

    Cardiovascular effects of coffee and caffeine

    Am J Cardiol

    (1984)
  • R.F. Brown et al.

    Direct and indirect relationships between emotional intelligence and subjective fatigue in university students

    J Psychosom Res

    (2006)
  • E.T. Kahn-Greene et al.

    The effects of sleep deprivation on symptoms of psychopathology in healthy adults

    Sleep Med

    (2007)
  • M. Spinella

    Prefrontal substrates of empathy: psychometric evidence in a community sample

    Biol Psychol

    (2005)
  • A. Bechara et al.

    Insensitivity to future consequences following damage to human prefrontal cortex

    Cognition

    (1994)
  • R.S. de Pinho et al.

    Hypersomnolence and accidents in truck drivers: a cross-sectional study

    Chronobiol Int

    (2006)
  • C.A. Kushida

    Countermeasures for sleep loss and deprivation

    Curr Treat Options Neurol

    (2006)
  • G. Belenky et al.

    Patterns of performance degradation and restoration during sleep restriction and subsequent recovery: a sleep dose–response study

    J Sleep Res

    (2003)
  • N.J. Wesensten et al.

    Performance and alertness effects of caffeine, dextroamphetamine, and modafinil during sleep deprivation

    J Sleep Res

    (2005)
  • A.P. Kendall et al.

    Effects of sleep deprivation on lateral visual attention

    Int J Neurosci

    (2006)
  • H.P. Van Dongen et al.

    The cumulative cost of additional wakefulness: dose–response effects on neurobehavioral functions and sleep physiology from chronic sleep restriction and total sleep deprivation

    Sleep

    (2003)
  • S.M. Doran et al.

    Sustained attention performance during sleep deprivation: evidence of state instability

    Archives Italiennes de Biologie (Pisa)

    (2001)
  • L. Linde et al.

    The effect of one night without sleep on problem-solving and immediate recall

    Psychol Res

    (1992)
  • S.P. Drummond et al.

    Effects of two nights sleep deprivation and two nights recovery sleep on response inhibition

    J Sleep Res

    (2006)
  • W.D.S. Killgore et al.

    Impaired decision-making following 49 h of sleep deprivation

    J Sleep Res

    (2006)
  • L. Linde et al.

    Auditory attention and multiattribute decision-making during a 33 h sleep-deprivation period: mean performance and between-subject dispersions

    Ergonomics

    (1999)
  • P.G. Binks et al.

    Short-term total sleep deprivations does not selectively impair higher cortical functioning

    Sleep

    (1999)
  • J.S. Durmer et al.

    Neurocognitive consequences of sleep deprivation

    Semin Neurol

    (2005)
  • Y. Harrison et al.

    The impact of sleep deprivation on decision making: a review

    J Exp Psychol Appl

    (2000)
  • R.T. Wilkinson

    The measurement of sleepiness

  • Y. Harrison et al.

    Sleep loss impairs short and novel language tasks having a prefrontal focus

    J Sleep Res

    (1998)
  • J.P. Nilsson et al.

    Less effective executive functioning after one night’s sleep deprivation

    J Sleep Res

    (2005)
  • M. Thomas et al.

    Neural basis of alertness and cognitive performance impairments during sleepiness. I. Effects of 24 h of sleep deprivation on waking human regional brain activity

    J Sleep Res

    (2000)
  • A.R. Damasio

    The somatic marker hypothesis and the possible functions of the prefrontal cortex

    Philos Trans R Soc Lond B Biol Sci

    (1996)
  • A.R. Damasio
    (1994)
  • Bar-On R, Parker JDA. BarOn Emotional Quotient-Inventory: Youth Version (BarOn EQi:YV): The Psychological Corporation;...
  • J.D. Mayer et al.

    Perceiving affective content in ambiguous visual stimuli: a component of emotional intelligence

    J Pers Assess

    (1990)
  • P. Salovey et al.

    Emotional intelligence

    Imagin Cogn Pers

    (1990)
  • Cited by (0)

    View full text