Impact of Sleep Deprivation and Anxiety on Social Understanding and Social Functioning: Experimental Data, 2020-2023

The data here include one large, multi-paradigm study on the impact of sleep deprivation on mentalizing and cognition and a series of studies on the impact of anxiety on belief and desire reasoning. The rationale for the broader project was to consider the hypothesis that anxiety and sleep deprivation impact mentalizing in distinct ways for distinct reasons. Mentalizing (also known as theory of mind) is our ability to understand other people’s mental states.
There are good reasons to expect that sleep deprivation might impact mentalizing. Sleep deprivation impacts processes associated with mentalizing, including executive functioning, and other social processes, such as emotion recognition. We wanted to provide the first detailed consideration of whether sleep deprivation impacted mentalizing itself.

Participants took part in paradigms when rested and when sleep deprived. These included three mentalizing tasks: the reading the mind in the eyes task, the belief-desire reasoning task and the emotional egocentricity touch paradigm. These allowed us to test the impact of sleep deprivation on mentalizing ability, egocentrism and self-other distinction. Sleep deprivation only negatively impacted overall performance. We concluded that sleep deprivation may impact overall processing performance at mentalizing, rather than specific processes, such as the ability to inhibit egocentrism or distinguish between self and other perspectives.

It has been proposed that anxiety makes us more egocentric, to overcome uncertainty. We wished to examine this in belief reasoning. In study one, participants completed a belief-desire reasoning task when anxious (manipulated with an autobiographical writing task) and when relaxed. There was no impact of anxiety on performance. To understand this, we conducted two follow-up studies. The first examined the impact of the independent variable, by using a threat-of-shock paradigm. The second, the impact of the dependent variable, through requiring participants to infer the belief of the character. Both replicated the original findings.