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Lack of sleep affects moral judgment, find scientists

(AFP)
Updated: 2007-03-05 14:27

Getting a good night's sleep is vital not only for your physical health and emotional well-being, but also for your ability to make moral decisions.

The study, by researchers at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research led by William D.S. Killgore, PhD, found that finds that sleep deprivation impairs the ability to integrate emotion and cognition to guide moral judgments.

As a part of the research scientists studied 26 healthy adults, who made judgments about the "appropriateness" of various courses of action in response to three types of moral dilemmas on two separate occasions: at rested baseline and again following 53 hours of continuous wakefulness.

They found that sleep deprivation resulted in significantly longer time taken for solving moral personal dilemmas.

The findings suggest that continuous wakefulness has a particularly debilitating effect on judgment and decision making processes that depend heavily upon the integration of emotion with cognition.

Dr Killgore added that the results provide further support to the hypothesis that sleep loss is particularly disruptive to the ventromedial prefrontal regions of the brain, which are important for the integration of affect and cognition in the service of judgment and decision making.

"Most of us are confronted with moral dilemmas nearly every day, although the majority of these choices are minor and of little consequence," said Dr Killgore.

"Although such decisions are inextricably steeped in social, emotional, religious and moral values, and their correct courses of action cannot be determined through scientific inquiry, it is well within the realm of science to ask how the brain goes about solving such dilemmas and what factors, whether internal or external to the individual, contribute to the judgments and decisions that are ultimately reached," he added.

According to Dr. Killgore, these findings do not suggest that sleep deprivation leads to a decline in "morality" or in the quality of moral beliefs, but a latency to respond and the change in the leniency or permissiveness of response style as evidenced by the tendency to decide that particular courses of action were "appropriate" before and after sleep loss.

"Our results simply suggest that when sleep deprived, individuals appear to be selectively slower in their deliberations about moral personal dilemmas relative to other types of dilemmas," said Killgore.

The study is published in the March 1st issue of the journal SLEEP.