Self-regulation and social behavior during sleep deprivation.

An emerging literature is specifically focusing on the effects of sleep deprivation on aspects of social functioning and underlying neural changes. Two critical facets of social behavior emerge that are negatively impacted by sleep deprivation-self-regulation, which includes behavioral and emotional regulation, and social monitoring, which includes perceiving and interpreting cues relating to self and others. Sleep deprived individuals performing tasks with social components show altered brain activity in areas of the prefrontal cortex implicated in self-control, inhibition, evaluation, and decision-making, in proximity to mesocorticolimbic pathways to reward and emotional processing areas. These cognitive changes lead to increased reward seeking and behaviors that promote negative health outcomes (such as increased consumption of indulgence foods). These changes also lead to emotional disinhibition and increased responses to negative stimuli, leading to reductions in trust, empathy, and humor. Concomitant attentional instability leads to impaired social information processing, impairing individual and team performance and increasing likelihood of error, incident, and injury. Together, changes to reward seeking, the foundational components of social interaction, and interpretation of social cues, can result in unpleasant or deviant behavior. These behaviors are perceived and negatively responded to by others, leading to a cycle of conflict and withdrawal. Further studies are necessary and timely. Educational and behavioral interventions are required to reduce health-damaging behaviors, and to reduce emotionally-laden negative interpretation of sleep-deprived exchanges. This may assist with health, and with team cohesion (and improved performance and safety) in the workplace and the home.

Impact of Intensive Lifestyle Intervention on Neural Food Cue Reactivity: Action for Health in Diabetes Brain Ancillary Study.

OBJECTIVE: The Action for Health in Diabetes (Look AHEAD) research study was a randomized trial comparing the effects of an intensive lifestyle intervention (ILI) versus a diabetes support and education (DSE) control group in adults with type 2 diabetes and overweight or obesity. Functional magnetic resonance imaging was used to determine whether neural food cue reactivity differed for these groups 10 years after randomization. METHODS: A total of 232 participants (ILI, n = 125, 72% female; DSE, n = 107, 64% female) were recruited at three of the Look AHEAD sites for functional magnetic resonance imaging. Neural response to high-calorie foods compared with nonfoods was assessed in DSE versus ILI. Exploratory correlations were conducted within ILI to identify regions in which activity was associated with degree of weight loss. RESULTS: Voxel-wise whole-brain comparisons revealed greater reward-processing activity in left caudate for DSE compared with ILI and greater activity in attention- and visual-processing regions for ILI than DSE (P < 0.05, family-wise error corrected). Exploratory analyses revealed that greater weight loss among ILI participants from baseline was associated with brain activation indicative of increased cognitive control and attention and visual processing in response to high-calorie food cues (P < 0.001, uncorrected). CONCLUSIONS: These findings suggest there may be legacy effects of participation in a behavioral weight loss intervention, with reduced reward-related activity and enhanced attention or visual processing in response to high-calorie foods.