Are you cranky when you don’t get enough sleep?

It's no secret that poor sleep gets in the way of all kinds of good things in life. Over the weekend, a team of researchers from UC Berkeley said it was exploring yet another way that lack of sleep may affect us: by making it harder for us to appreciate our loved ones.

Psychology doctoral student Amie Gordon spoke Saturday about three studies she's conducting at a meeting of the Society for Personality and Social Psychology in New Orleans. In the first study, 56 undergraduates were asked to assess their previous night's sleep; some of them were further asked to write up to five things for which they were grateful and then report how thankful or grateful they felt at that moment. (It's known that people who experience gratitude are happier, healthier and better connected to those around them.) People who had slept well reported feeling more grateful after making their lists than people who had slept poorly.