If you have trouble distinguishing friend from foe, you might not be getting enough sleep.
A new study shows that sleep deprivation dulls our ability to accurately read facial expressions. The deficit can have serious consequences, if you don’t notice a child is sick or in pain, for example, or if a potential mugger or violent predator is approaching.
“Recognizing the emotional expressions of someone else changes everything about whether or not you decide to interact with them, and in return, whether they interact with you,” says Matthew Walker, professor of psychology and neuroscience at the University of California, Berkeley. “These findings are especially worrying considering that two-thirds of people in the developed nations fail to get sufficient sleep.”
Friendly Or Threatening?
Indeed, the results don’t bode well for countless sleep-starved groups, says Andrea Goldstein-Piekarski, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, who started the study as a PhD student at UC Berkeley.
