Notably, such a decline was associated with lower REM sleep amounts, supporting a role for REM sleep in overnight emotional processing. As expected, these findings were further associated with a decrease in prefrontal connectivity patterns in both EEG and fMRI signals, reflecting a profound decline in cognitive control of emotion. As a consequence, sleep deprivation resulted in similar processing of neutral and negative distractors, thus disabling accurate emotional discrimination. Results reveal that, although participants showed enhanced limbic and electrophysiological reactions to emotional distractors regardless of their sleep state, they were specifically unable to ignore neutral distracting information after sleep deprivation. Both tasks involved irrelevant emotional and neutral distractors presented during a competing cognitive challenge, thus creating a continuous demand for regulating emotional processing. Therefore, we explored the influence of sleep deprivation on the human brain using two different cognitiveвЂ“emotional tasks, recorded using fMRI and EEG. Such impairments can ultimately fail adaptive attempts to regulate emotional processing (also known as cognitive control of emotion), although this hypothesis has not been examined directly. Sleep deprivation has been shown recently to alter emotional processing possibly associated with reduced frontal regulation.

Mood reactivity