A new study, reviewing 50 years of sleep research, offers clarity on the effects of various sleep deficiencies on emotional health.
In a culture where long work hours are rewarded and distractions abound, sound sleep is often elusive.Source: StockAsso/Shutterstock
In a culture like ours, in which long work hours are expected and pleasurable nonstop distractions abound, sound sleep is often hard to come by. Our society promotes hard work as a path toand self-fulfillment, and many people believe they can learn how to get by on little sleep with no ill effects. No wonder so many of us are sleep-deprived.get less than the recommended amount of nightly sleep. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, about one in three U.S.
The authors focused on studies that measured the effects of sleep problems on several important emotional outcomes, including positive and negative affect, general mood disturbance , emotional reactivity ,or sleep-disorder diagnosis as well as any medical conditions known to impact sleep and/or emotional functioning. They included only experimental studies with adequate control groups and those that measured at least one emotion-related dependent variable.
Fifty-six studies looked at sleep restriction . Like SD, SR had a significant effect on both positive and negative emotions, as well as mood disturbance and anxiety outcomes, with dose-response effects for positive emotion. “Positive affect decreased gradually as sleep duration decreased. The largest deficits in positive affect occurred around 4 hours of sleep.” SR was also found to affectTwenty-one of the included studies used sleep fragmentation .
The review contains several limitations. For one, sleep studies by nature find it difficult to fully mask participants to their condition, which may have produced expectancy effects. Moreover, lab experiments are inherently low on what psychologists call"ecological validity," because conditions in the lab do not resemble real-world conditions. In addition, the literature reviewed mostly relied on young adult samples, which may not represent the population at large.
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