Personality and Psychopathic Changes

Sleep deprivation significantly affects cerebral functioning within many areas, including the prefrontal cortex, a region that is critical for the modulation of emotional processes and basic personality functioning. Research suggests that sleep deprivation may affect a variety of cognitive capacities, but some of its most profound and reliable effects appear to be on mood and emotional processing. Sleep deprivation appears to lead to worsening of mood, degraded emotional intelligence, reduced constructive thinking capacities, and suppressed frustration tolerance. There is also evidence that sleep deprivation is associated with a subclinical increase in self-rated symptoms of psychopathology such as somatization, anxiety, depression, and paranoid feelings of persecution and resentment. Paradoxically, among clinically depressed patients, sleep deprivation can actually have short-lived mood-elevating effects.