Being sleepy has a number of negative effects on cognition, but the ability to tell when someone is being sarcastic doesn’t appear to be one of them.
New research published in PLOS One has found that sleep deprivation does not completely hinder a person’s ability to interpret sarcasm.
The researchers from Université libre de Bruxelles had 15 sleep deprived participants and 15 well-rested participants listen to voicemail messages, and asked them to interpret whether the messages were sarcastic or sincere.
The sleep-deprived participants were expected to be less accurate in detecting sarcasm than the well-rested participants, since previous research has found that sleep deprivation impairs other aspects of social functioning.
“Detecting a speaker’s sarcastic intention and adequately inferring whether his/her message will be perceived as sarcastic by the addressee is a complex process, which recruits intertwined cognitive functions such as inhibition, working memory, flexibility and attention,” the researchers explained.
But the researchers failed to find a statistically significant difference between the two groups. The sleep-deprived participants were just as accurate in detecting sarcasm as the well-rested participants.
“Interestingly, our results show that sleep deprived participants end up being as accurate as participants having slept normally, indicating that (fortunately) a night of sleep deprivation does not completely hinder one’s ability to interpret sarcasm,” the researchers wrote.
