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Updated: Dec 16, 2025
Psychophysiological Assessment of the Effectiveness of Emotion Regulation Strategies in Childhood
Published on: February 11, 2017
Sleep restriction alters children's positive emotional responses, but effects are moderated by anxiety
Candice A Alfano1, Joanne L Bower2, Allison G Harvey3
1Department of Psychology, University of Houston, Houston, TX, USA.
Insights
Inadequate sleep negatively impacts children's positive emotions, especially in those with anxiety. Sleep restriction affects emotional processing and regulation in children.
Area of Science:
- Child Psychology
- Sleep Science
- Emotional Health
Background:
- Cross-sectional studies link insufficient sleep to poor emotional health in children.
- Experimental research on sleep deprivation's emotional effects in children is limited.
- Pre-existing anxiety may worsen sleep loss impacts on children's emotional well-being.
Purpose of the Study:
- To experimentally investigate the effects of sleep restriction on children's emotional processing.
- To examine how anxiety symptoms moderate the impact of sleep loss on children's emotions.
Main Methods:
- 53 children (7–11 years) underwent lab assessments after normal sleep and sleep restriction (6–7 hours/night).
- Sleep was monitored using polysomnography and actigraphy.
- Emotional processing was assessed via subjective reports, psychophysiology, and objective emotional expression during emotion-eliciting tasks.
Main Results:
- Sleep restriction led to negative changes in children's affect, arousal, facial expressions, and emotion regulation.
- These effects were more pronounced for positive emotional stimuli.
- Anxiety symptoms significantly moderated the observed alterations in emotional processing.
Conclusions:
- Inadequate sleep disproportionately affects positive emotions in children compared to negative emotions.
- Pre-existing anxiety amplifies the negative emotional consequences of sleep restriction in children.
- Findings have implications for children's social-emotional development and long-term affective risk.
Background:
An abundance of cross-sectional research links inadequate sleep with poor emotional health, but experimental studies in children are rare. Further, the impact of sleep loss is not uniform across individuals and pre-existing anxiety might potentiate the effects of poor sleep on children's emotional functioning.
Methods:
A sample of 53 children (7-11 years, M = 9.0; 56% female) completed multimodal, assessments in the laboratory when rested and after two nights of sleep restriction (7 and 6 hr in bed, respectively). Sleep was monitored with polysomnography and actigraphy. Subjective reports of affect and arousal, psychophysiological reactivity and regulation, and objective emotional expression were examined during two emotional processing tasks, including one where children were asked to suppress their emotional responses.
Results:
After sleep restriction, deleterious alterations were observed in children's affect, emotional arousal, facial expressions, and emotion regulation. These effects were primarily detected in response to positive emotional stimuli. The presence of anxiety symptoms moderated most alterations in emotional processing observed after sleep restriction.
Conclusions:
Results suggest inadequate sleep preferentially impacts positive compared to negative emotion in prepubertal children and that pre-existing anxiety symptoms amplify these effects. Implications for children's everyday socioemotional lives and long-term affective risk are highlighted.
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