Neuroticism relates to daytime wakefulness and sleep devaluation via high neurophysiological efficiency in the bilateral prefrontal cortex: a preliminary study.

Higher wake promotion against sleep drive boosts cognitive processing, but it also seems to increase the risk of insomnia by reinforcing an obsession with sleep in neurotic patients. To explore whether a personality trait of neuroticism simultaneously facilitates wake-promoting ability and sleep devaluation via a common regional prefrontal function under a sleep-restricted condition, working memory tasks were administered to 49 healthy humans after a 2-h sleep restriction. Higher wake-promoting ability demonstrated in a high-load task was correlated with lower bilateral prefrontal activation, as measured by near-infrared spectroscopy. Structural equation modeling revealed that neuroticism predicts sleep devaluation and wake-promoting ability via left and right regional prefrontal efficiency, respectively. Our results indicate that neuroticism-related neural efficiency increases resilience to sleepiness, but decreases sleep satisfaction.