We have all experienced nights when we didn’t get enough sleep. And we may have noticed that as a result we were more irritable or more anxious or generally less able to handle stressful situations. In order to understand better the effects of sleep deprivation on our emotional health, Palmer and colleagues conducted a meta-analysis over 154 relevant studies. They found that, as many of us may have experienced, sleep deprivation often reduces positive emotions and increases anxiety. The authors also found that disrupting REM (normal dreaming) sleep increased negative emotions more than disruptions during other stages of sleep.
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Do Emotions Make It Harder to Think and Act Logically?
In the classic television show “Star Trek”, the Vulcan character Mr. Spock was able to think and act more logically than his human shipmates because he did not experience emotions. The implication of course is that human emotions somehow interfere with thinking logically. But is this true?
There have been many experiments designed to find out whether emotions interfere with something called “cognitive control”, which is the ability to ignore irrelevant information that would otherwise interfere with performing an important cognitive task. Results from these experiments have been confusing, so Zhang and colleagues decided to see if a meta-analysis of 71 of these studies would clear things up. Their results show that the kinds of emotions that can be studied in a laboratory setting don’t interfere much with cognitive control and may, under the right circumstances, even help. So perhaps Vulcans don’t have such a big advantage over us emotional humans after all.
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Dr Martin Fracker 