Dr Laura Boubert, Principal Lecturer in Cognitive Psychology and course leader for the Cognitive and Clinical Neuroscience BSc at the University of Westminster, has written an article for The Conversation about Berkeley University’s new study which suggests that the amount of sleep one gets affects how willing they are to help other people.
In the article, Boubert wrote: “171 volunteers recruited online kept a diary of their sleep before doing the same questionnaire. For both experiments the researchers found that tired participants scored lower on the altruism questionnaire. This was the case regardless of participants’ empathy traits and whether the person they were supposed to help was a stranger or someone familiar to them.”
Discussing the effects of the hour of sleep lost to daylight savings, Boubert explained that “the researchers analysed over 3.8 million charity donations made in the US before and after the clocks were changed for summer, which causes everyone to lose an hour’s sleep. Donations decreased by 10% in the days after the clocks changed compared to the weeks before and after the transition.”
Boubert clarified that analysis of fMRI imaging has found sleep deprivation to be seemingly linked to reduced activity in the area of the brain involved in social cognition, and that although the change in brain activity was related to sleep quantity not quality, the effect is short-lived and generosity levels balance back out once normal sleep patterns are regained.
In her concluding remarks, she added: “[social cognition] is affected by how well we sleep; our memory, all aspects of memory of previous situations, the quality of our decisions, how impulsive we are and especially our emotions and how well we can regulate them. It’s only to be expected that the amount of money we are willing to donate would also be sensitive to sleep.
“So next time a friend asks you to donate to their marathon fundraiser, sleep on it.”
Read the full article on The Conversation’s website.
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