International Journal of Behavioral Sciences

International Journal of Behavioral Sciences

IS Sleep Quality Associated with Emotion Regulation and Moral Decision-making?

Document Type : Original Article

Authors
1 The Institute for Research and Development in the Humanities (SAMT)
2 Islamic Azad University
Abstract
Introduction: Adequate sleep may help regulate emotions, which in turn may influence moral decision-making. Therefore, the aim of the current study was to examine the relationship between sleep quality, emotion regulation and moral decision-making.
Method: In this descriptive online survey, we administered three questionnaires, including the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index, the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, and the Moral Decision-Making Questionnaire, to 306 non-randomly selected employees of the Iranian National Tax Administration who were surveyed via the Internet between December 2021 and January 2022.
Results: Analysis of data based on Kendall's Tau correlation coefficient showed no significant relationship between sleep quality with emotion regulation and decision-making and most of their subscales. Only a weak direct relationship was observed between some indicators of poor sleep quality (poor subjective sleep quality, sleep disturbances, and use of sleep medications) and utilitarian low-conflict direct moral decision-making.
Conclusion: According to findings it can be stated that for people who have sufficient cognitive capacity, time to manage their emotions, and access to society's established moral values, poor sleep quality may not be significantly associated with poor emotion regulation and moral decision-making.
Keywords

  1. Choobineh A, Javadpour F, Azmoon H, Keshavarzi S, Daneshmandi H. The prevalence of fatigue, sleepiness, and sleep disorders among petrochemical employees in Iran. Fatigue: Biomedicine, Health & Behavior. 2018;6(3):153-62. doi: 10.1080/21641846.2018.1461252
  2. Ghalichi L, Pournik O, Ghaffari M, Vingard E. Sleep quality among health care workers. Archives of Iranian medicine. 2013;16(2):100-3. doi: doi: 10.1007/s11325-020-02135-9
  3. Krebs DL, Denton K, Wark G. The Forms and Functions of Real‐life Moral Decision‐making. Journal of Moral Education. 1997;26(2):131-45. doi: 10.1080/0305724970260202
  4. Braunack-Mayer AJ. What makes a problem an ethical problem? An empirical perspective on the nature of ethical problems in general practice. Journal of Medical Ethics. 2001;27(2):98-103. doi: 10.1136/jme.27.2.98
  5. Barnes CM, Gunia BC, Wagner DT. Sleep and moral awareness. Journal of Sleep Research. 2014;24(2):181-8. doi: 10.1111/jsr.12231
  6. Venkatraman V, Huettel SA, Chuah LYM, Payne JW, Chee MWL. Sleep Deprivation Biases the Neural Mechanisms Underlying Economic Preferences. The Journal of Neuroscience. 2011;31(10):3712-8. doi: 10.1523/jneurosci.4407-10.2011
  7. Killgore WDS, Balkin TJ, Wesensten NJ. Impaired decision making following 49 h of sleep deprivation. Journal of Sleep Research. 2006;15(1):7-13. doi: 10.1111/j.1365-2869.2006.00487.x
  8. Killgore WDS, Killgore DB, Day LM, Li C, Kamimori GH, Balkin TJ. The Effects of 53 Hours of Sleep Deprivation on Moral Judgment. Sleep. 2007;30(3):345-52. doi: 10.1093/sleep/30.3.345
  9. Olsen OK, Pallesen S, Jarle E. The Impact of Partial Sleep Deprivation on Moral Reasoning in Military Officers. Sleep. 2010;33(8):1086-90. doi: 10.1093/sleep/33.8.1086
  10. Tempesta D, Couyoumdjian A, Moroni F, Marzano C, De Gennaro L, Ferrara M. The impact of one night of sleep deprivation on moral judgments. Social Neuroscience. 2012;7(3):292-300. doi: 10.1080/17470919.2011.614002
  11. Trémolière B, Gosling CJ. Association of natural sleep with moral utilitarianism: No evidence from 6 preregistered studies. Psychonomic Bulletin & Review. 2021;28(5):1726-34. doi: 10.3758/s13423-021-01945-6
  12. Trémolière B, Schwartz F, Gosling CJ. Association of sleep with moral severity to accidental harm transgressions: A cross‐sectional study. Journal of Sleep Research. 2022;32(2). doi: 10.1111/jsr.13623
  13. Haidt J. The emotional dog and its rational tail: A social intuitionist approach to moral judgment. Psychological Review. 2001;108(4):814-34. doi: 10.1037/0033-295x.108.4.814
  14. Haidt J. The New Synthesis in Moral Psychology. Science. 2007;316(5827):998-1002. doi: 10.1126/science.1137651
  15. Greene JD, Nystrom LE, Engell AD, Darley JM, Cohen JD. The Neural Bases of Cognitive Conflict and Control in Moral Judgment. Neuron. 2004;44(2):389-400. doi: 10.1016/j.neuron.2004.09.027
  16. Heekeren HR, Wartenburger I, Schmidt H, Prehn K, Schwintowski H-P, Villringer A. Influence of bodily harm on neural correlates of semantic and moral decision-making. NeuroImage. 2005;24(3):887-97. doi: 10.1016/j.neuroimage.2004.09.026
  17. Greene JD. The dual-process theory of moral judgment does not deny that people can make compromise judgments. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. 2023;120(6). doi: 10.1073/pnas.2220396120
  18. Cushman F, Young L, Greene JD. Multi‐system Moral Psychology. The Moral Psychology Handbook: Oxford University Press; 2010. p. 47-71.
  19. Tassy S, Oullier O, Duclos Y, Coulon O, Mancini J, Deruelle C, et al. Disrupting the right prefrontal cortex alters moral judgement. Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience. 2011;7(3):282-8. doi: 10.1093/scan/nsr008
  20. Haidt J. Moral psychology for the twenty-first century. Journal of Moral Education. 2013;42(3):281-97. doi: 10.1080/03057240.2013.817327
  21. Gross JJ. The Emerging Field of Emotion Regulation: An Integrative Review. Review of General Psychology. 1998;2(3):271-99. doi: 10.1037/1089-2680.2.3.271
  22. Avramova YR, Inbar Y. Emotion and moral judgment. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Cognitive Science. 2013;4(2):169-78. doi: 10.1002/wcs.1216
  23. Szekely RD, Miu AC. Incidental emotions in moral dilemmas: The influence of emotion regulation. Cognition and Emotion. 2014;29(1):64-75. doi: 10.1080/02699931.2014.895300
  24. Zhao J, Harris M, Vigo R. Anxiety and moral judgment: The shared deontological tendency of the behavioral inhibition system and the unique utilitarian tendency of trait anxiety. Personality and Individual Differences. 2016;95:29-33. doi: 10.1016/j.paid.2016.02.024
  25. Zhang L, Li Z, Wu X, Zhang Z. Why People with More Emotion Regulation Difficulties Made a More Deontological Judgment: The Role of Deontological Inclinations. Frontiers in Psychology. 2017;8. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.02095
  26. Cellini N, Lotto L, Pletti C, Sarlo M. Daytime REM sleep affects emotional experience but not decision choices in moral dilemmas. Scientific Reports. 2017;7(1). doi: 10.1038/s41598-017-11530-4
  27. Tempesta D, Salfi F, De Gennaro L, Ferrara M. The impact of five nights of sleep restriction on emotional reactivity. Journal of Sleep Research. 2020;29(5). doi: 10.1111/jsr.13022
  28. Pace-Schott EF, Germain A, Milad MR. Effects of sleep on memory for conditioned fear and fear extinction. Psychological Bulletin. 2015;141(4):835-57. doi: 10.1037/bul0000014
  29. Palmer CA, Alfano CA. Sleep and emotion regulation: An organizing, integrative review. Sleep Medicine Reviews. 2017;31:6-16. doi: 10.1016/j.smrv.2015.12.006
  30. Bujang MA, Baharum N. Sample Size Guideline for Correlation Analysis. World Journal of Social Science Research. 2016;3(1):37. doi: 10.22158/wjssr.v3n1p37
  31. Carmona-Perera M, Caracuel A, Pérez-García M, Verdejo-García A. Brief Moral Decision-Making Questionnaire: A Rasch-derived short form of the Greene dilemmas. Psychological Assessment. 2015;27(2):424-32. doi: 10.1037/pas0000049
  32. Buysse DJ, Reynolds CF, Monk TH, Berman SR, Kupfer DJ. The Pittsburgh sleep quality index: A new instrument for psychiatric practice and research. Psychiatry Research. 1989;28(2):193-213. doi: 10.1016/0165-1781(89)90047-4
  33. Farrahi Moghaddam J, Nakhaee N, Sheibani V, Garrusi B, Amirkafi A. Reliability and validity of the Persian version of the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI-P). Sleep and Breathing. 2011;16(1):79-82. doi: 10.1007/s11325-010-0478-5s
  34. Goldberg DP, Hillier VF. A scaled version of the General Health Questionnaire. Psychological Medicine. 1979;9(1):139-45. doi: 10.1017/s0033291700021644
  35. Newson R. Parameters behind “Nonparametric” Statistics: Kendall's tau, Somers’ D and Median Differences. The Stata Journal: Promoting communications on statistics and Stata. 2002;2(1):45-64. doi: 10.1177/1536867x0200200103
  36. Christensen JF, Gomila A. Moral dilemmas in cognitive neuroscience of moral decision-making: A principled review. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. 2012;36(4):1249-64. doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2012.02.008
  37. Lowe CJ, Safati A, Hall PA. The neurocognitive consequences of sleep restriction: A meta-analytic review. Neuroscience & Biobehavioral Reviews. 2017;80:586-604. doi: 10.1016/j.neubiorev.2017.07.010
  38. Minkel JD, McNealy K, Gianaros PJ, Drabant EM, Gross JJ, Manuck SB, et al. Sleep quality and neural circuit function supporting emotion regulation. Biology of Mood & Anxiety Disorders. 2012;2(1). doi: 10.1186/2045-5380-2-22
  39. Cameron CD, Lindquist KA, Gray K. A Constructionist Review of Morality and Emotions. Personality and Social Psychology Review. 2015;19(4):371-94. doi: 10.1177/1088868314566683
  40. Feinberg M, Willer R, Antonenko O, John OP. Liberating Reason From the Passions. Psychological Science. 2012;23(7):788-95. doi: 10.1177/0956797611434747
  41. Lee JJ, Gino F. Poker-faced morality: Concealing emotions leads to utilitarian decision making. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes. 2015;126:49-64. doi: 10.1016/j.obhdp.2014.10.006