Impact of Sleep Deprivation and Anxiety on Social Understanding and Social Functioning: Experimental Data, 2020-2023

Surtees, Andrew (2025). Impact of Sleep Deprivation and Anxiety on Social Understanding and Social Functioning: Experimental Data, 2020-2023. [Data Collection]. Colchester, Essex: UK Data Service. 10.5255/UKDA-SN-857875

Poor sleep and anxiety pose significant economic and social challenges. Inadequate sleep costs the UK economy 1.3-1.9% of Gross Domestic Product each year and has significant health and social consequences. Common mental health difficulties, such as anxiety, account for 17.6 million sick days yearly and reduce GDP by around 1.3%. Additional to this are the indirect costs of poor sleep and anxiety - the costs to our social understanding, social interaction and social relationships. Understanding other people's perspectives, beliefs, desires and feelings is important. The sophistication with which humans do this is one of the things that has led to our success as a species. We live in large communities and cooperate to meet shared goals. We learn from others, teach our children and care for those more vulnerable than ourselves. Each of these activities relies on our understanding of what other people see, believe, want or feel. Sometimes others tell us this information, but sometimes we have to infer it from the way they act.

Everyday experience suggests poor sleep and anxiety affect our social understanding. Who has not noticed anxious students nervously ignoring each other as they wait for an exam? How many of us have spent time apologizing to our mothers when we forgot to send them a birthday card because we were exhausted after over-working towards a deadline? Emerging experimental evidence supports the suggestion that sleep deprivation and anxiety can change our social understanding and that those with long-term experiences of sleep problems or anxiety experience social difficulties. What is less clear is exactly how sleep and anxiety impact on our social understanding and how variability in these experiences impacts our longer-term social functioning. One hypothesis that is consistent with the literature is that anxiety makes us more selfish, encouraging us to focus on our own point of view at the expense of others. Another is that sleep deprivation makes us more muddled, making it harder to distinguish between our own point of view and other people's. A third is that those with better sleep and lower levels of anxiety will function better in the longer term because they understand people better.

To look at the impact of sleep deprivation, we will test people on three tasks, after having them remain awake for a whole night. The tasks will investigate their ability to think about other people's thoughts and feelings. Their responses will be informative as to whether sleep deprivation has caused them to have difficulties in distinguishing between their own thoughts and feelings, and other people's. To look at the impact of anxiety, we will induce anxiety in people and then have them do the very same tasks. People will be made anxious by recalling and writing about a time they felt anxious. Here, we predict people's responses will show evidence of increased selfishness in their judgments. To look at the relationship between long-term, everyday tendencies towards anxiety and poor sleep, and social difficulties, participants will complete a number of questionnaires and short experimental tasks. We will use sophisticated statistical modelling to test the relationship between people's traits in these areas.

Each of these experiments will provide exciting new evidence for how everyday experiences impact on our social understanding. They will also open up new avenues for investigation, looking at the impact of these findings. Clearer evidence for the way in which poor sleep and anxiety impact social understanding is highly relevant to clinical populations, such as those with insomnia, generalized anxiety disorder and autism. Further, specialist populations, such as new parents, junior doctors or soldiers in combat have to experience poor sleep and anxiety at the same time as making crucial social judgments. The novel insights offered by our project will provide a model for understanding how their abilities are affected.

Data description (abstract)

The data here include one large, multi-paradigm study on the impact of sleep deprivation on mentalizing and cognition and a series of studies on the impact of anxiety on belief and desire reasoning. The rationale for the broader project was to consider the hypothesis that anxiety and sleep deprivation impact mentalizing in distinct ways for distinct reasons. Mentalizing (also known as theory of mind) is our ability to understand other people’s mental states.
There are good reasons to expect that sleep deprivation might impact mentalizing. Sleep deprivation impacts processes associated with mentalizing, including executive functioning, and other social processes, such as emotion recognition. We wanted to provide the first detailed consideration of whether sleep deprivation impacted mentalizing itself.

Participants took part in paradigms when rested and when sleep deprived. These included three mentalizing tasks: the reading the mind in the eyes task, the belief-desire reasoning task and the emotional egocentricity touch paradigm. These allowed us to test the impact of sleep deprivation on mentalizing ability, egocentrism and self-other distinction. Sleep deprivation only negatively impacted overall performance. We concluded that sleep deprivation may impact overall processing performance at mentalizing, rather than specific processes, such as the ability to inhibit egocentrism or distinguish between self and other perspectives.

It has been proposed that anxiety makes us more egocentric, to overcome uncertainty. We wished to examine this in belief reasoning. In study one, participants completed a belief-desire reasoning task when anxious (manipulated with an autobiographical writing task) and when relaxed. There was no impact of anxiety on performance. To understand this, we conducted two follow-up studies. The first examined the impact of the independent variable, by using a threat-of-shock paradigm. The second, the impact of the dependent variable, through requiring participants to infer the belief of the character. Both replicated the original findings.

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