Abstract:

Sleep deprivation is a situation of shorter-than-optimal sleep time caused by some environmental or individual reasons. A variety of empirical researches studied the relationship between sleep deprivation and risky choice, but there was an argument about whether sleep deprivation leaded to risk-taking. This paper tried to explore the psychological mechanism between sleep deprivation and risky choice. There are three elements influence risky decision making, (i.e., risk perception, risk tolerance and risk decision strategies), and its psychological mechanism can be explained by dual-process models of cognition and emotion. Furthermore, neural studies provided evidences to support our conclusion. In the future, on the one hand, because most sleep deprivation studies were examined in laboratory, more researches should be focused on the sleep loss in real life; on the other hand, interaction effect of cognition and emotion should be considered to further complete the theoretical model of sleep deprivation and risky choice.

Key words: sleep deprivation, risk perception, risk tolerance, risky choice, dual-process models