Objective: It has been recognized that sleep has an important effect on emotion processing. The aim of this study was to investigate the effect of previous night sleep duration on autonomic responses to musical stimuli in different emotional contexts.
Method: A frequency based measure of GSR, PR and ECG signals were examined in 35 healthy students in three groups of oversleeping, lack of sleep and normal sleep.
Results: The results of this study revealed that regardless of the emotional context of the musical stimuli (happy, relax, fear, and sadness), there was an increase in the maximum power of GSR, ECG and PR during the music time compared to the rest time in all the three groups. In addition, the higher value of these measures was achieved while the participants listened to relaxing music. Statistical analysis of the extracted features between each pair of emotional states revealed that the most significant differences were attained for ECG signals. These differences were more obvious in the participants with normal sleeping (p<10-18). The higher value of the indices has been shown, comparing long sleep duration with the normal one.
Conclusion: There was a strong relation between emotion and sleep duration, and this association can be observed by means of the ECG signals.