Research project SLEMEG - An MEG-study on the effects of insufficient sleep on emotional and attentional processes

Most of us have experienced one or a couple of nights without, or with insufficient sleep. It is well known that lack of sleep affects mood and attention, but how attention towards emotional information is affected by sleep loss is not yet clear.

We let healthy volunteers perform tasks that measures attention, with and without emotional content, after two nights of normal sleep and after two nights of sleep restricted to 2 hours (01:00-05:00). During the tasks we measure the neural activity using MEG and thereby hope to investigate the underlying neural mechanisms. The results can contribute to increase the knowledge about effects of sleep loss, where affective and cognitive processes interact.