AD ALTA
JOURNAL OF INTERDISCIPLINARY RESEARCH
Figure 1. Boxplots of the Eyes Test show a slight, yet not significant, improvement amongst most participants.
Source: own work by authors
Figure 2. The estimated marginal means of the questionnaire shows large similarities between both groups.
Source: own work by authors
In our sample, there is no significant effect of one night of acute
sleep deprivation on participants’ ability to successfully fill out
the Eyes Test despite the fact that Boxplots of the Eyes Test
show a slight, yet not significant, improvement amongst most
participants. One night of acute sleep deprivation was either not
strong enough or the physical effects of sleep deprivation do not
involve the markers we tested for. The 0-hypothesis (sleep
deprivation does not lead to impairment of ToM) can, at least on
the basis of our data, not be discarded. However, it must be
noted that the experiment was run on a limited sample
(25 participants), which was drawn from a population (Czech
military personnel) which receives regular training in
counterbalancing the effects of sleep deprivation.
In the modern world sleep deprivation is both common and can
have significant negative effects on work efficiency and overall
success. It is therefore paramount to understand both the
physical and the mental effects of sleep deprivation. In this
paper, we tested in how far sleep deprivation leads to symptoms
which resemble problems in Theory of Mind as observed in a
range of mental and neuro-degenerative disorders such as
autism, Asperger’s syndrome, Parkinson’s disease and
Huntington’s disease. We hypothesized that, given that our
participants were all healthy young males without a history of
neuro-degenerative illness, deficiencies in ToM would resemble
those observed in mental disorders most and therefore
administered a standardized autism-spectrum test which was
supplemented with a profession-specific hindsight test and a
range of tests for physical markers of fatigue. Our experiment
showed no significant differences between pre- and post- sleep
deprivation conditions in neither the ToM tests nor the tests for
physical markers.
It is however interesting to note that both the ToM and physical
post tests showed more, although not significantly more, overall
variability. Moreover, due to scheduling, the post-test was taken
around 4:00 a.m. rather than the more common 7:00 a.m.
(Killgore et al., 2017), which resulted in 3 hours less
wakefulness. This may be why there was no notable difference
in the physical markers we tested for. However, there is reason
to believe that sleep deprivation affects mental processing prior
to physical function and we should therefore expect that mental
effects of sleep deprivation can be observed without changes in
physical states. As such more research must be done into the
interaction between sleep deprivation and social cognition. We
recommend that further research builds on at least 48 hours of
wakefulness as our experiment clearly showed that ± 20 hours is
clearly not sufficient to illicit any notable effects.
4 Conclusions
Sleep deprivation is considered as important factor, which
influence leadership development and it requires cognition
(Chen, Chen, 2019). According to description of sleep
deprivation phenomenon, it is possible to decide, that there is
negative effect of sleep deprivation on working memory,
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