Sleep and Emotions: Does Sleep Differentially Effect Processing of Emotional Pictures.

Emotional faces and scenes as stimuli are heavily used in any research on emotions because they are highly effective for triggering affective processing that leads to emotions. However, little distinction is made regarding the qualitative differences in emotions elicited by these different forms of stimuli. In the present study we aim to examine differences between faces and scenes in affective processing in terms of behavioral responses across sleep & sleep deprivation. An analysis of variance showed that there is significant difference in affective processing of both the stimuli (faces and scenes). Although we observed increased effect of sleep over wake condition, the difference found in baseline and target session was not significant enough.