The Effect of Sleep Deprivation on Empathy Using fMRI Study of Hands Experimentations

Empathy is the Emotional processes that rely on adequate sleep and change with aging. In young adults, sleep deprivation has shown changes in the activation of the amygdala and prefrontal cortex [ 1]. It was demonstrated that seeing other people in pain gives rise to an emotional response and innervated the anterior insula and anterior midcingulate cortex bilaterally that they’re the core of empathy in the brain. In the early studies, activity in anterior insula was found correlated to self-rated trait empathy Method6 healthy volunteers were assigned two fMRI sessions. The second session was followed by a one-month limitation of sleep in the last three hours of sleep. This study was designed to investigate the effect of sleep deprivation on the empathy of people. ‘HANDS Experimentation is one of the best experiments to do this review [3]. In Fixed-effect of the GLM models, the contrasts of pain> no pain, no pain> pain, pain> baseline and no pain> baseline was applied. A paired T-test was used at 2nd level to check the effect of different types of these tasks. In the mixed effect model, the mean of the contrasts in different modes was extracted for individual and session.ResultsIn older participants, activity had grown in comparison with young adults during the state of pain> no pain, pain> baseline, and no pain> baseline. Z (gaussianised T/F) statistic images were thresholded non-parametrically using clusters determined by Z> 3.1 and a (corrected) cluster significance threshold of P=0.05 (Fig. 1).ConclusionsSleep deprivation increases the unpleasant pain seen in the elderly temporal-parietal junction. In the second session, no effect of sleep deprivation was found in the core empathy network, and we didn’t observe any statistically significant results (corrected p-value <0.05). These results are consistent with the ones reported in [3].[2]. We attempt to investigate the effects of sleep deprivation on neural substrates of empathy.