The outbreak of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) caused substantial changes in lifestyle, responsibilities, and stressors. Such dramatic societal changes might cause overall sleep health to ...decrease (stress view), to remain unchanged (resilience view), or even to improve (reduced work/schedule burden view).
We addressed this question using longitudinal, cross-sectional, and retrospective recall methodologies in 699 American adult participants in late March 2020, two weeks following the enactment of social distancing and shelter-in-place policies in the United States.
Relative to baseline data from mid February 2020, cross-sectional and longitudinal analyses demonstrated that average sleep quality was unchanged, or even improved, early in the pandemic. However, there were clear individual differences: approximately 25% of participants reported that their sleep quality had worsened, which was explained by stress vulnerability, caregiving, adverse life impact, shift work, and presence of COVID-19 symptoms.
Therefore, the COVID-19 pandemic has detrimentally impacted some individuals' sleep health while paradoxically benefited other individuals’ sleep health by reducing rigid work/school schedules such as early morning commitments.
•Good sleep quality helps people resist viral infections and function optimally.•Global sleep quality was generally resilient to pandemic-related changes to life.•Healthy, non-shiftworkers showedimprovements in sleep in longitudinal analyses.•Participants recalled their pre-pandemic sleep as better than it was.•Sleep worsened in shift workers, caregivers, and people with high COVID-19-related stress.
In younger adults, recently learned episodic memories are reactivated and consolidated during slow-wave sleep (SWS). It is interesting that SWS declines across the life span, but little research has ...examined whether sleep-dependent memory consolidation occurs in older adults. In this study, younger adults and healthy older adults encoded word pairs in the morning or evening and then returned following a sleep or no-sleep interval. Sleep-stage scoring was obtained by using a home sleep-stage monitoring system. In the younger adult group, there was a positive correlation between word retention and amount of SWS during the retention interval. In contrast, the older adults demonstrated no significant positive correlations but one significant negative correlation between memory and SWS. These findings suggest that the link between episodic memory and SWS that is typically observed in younger adults may be weakened or otherwise changed in the healthy older adult population.
Sleep is implicated in cognitive functioning in young adults. With increasing age, there are substantial changes to sleep quantity and quality, including changes to slow-wave sleep, spindle density, ...and sleep continuity/fragmentation. A provocative question for the field of cognitive aging is whether such changes in sleep physiology affect cognition (e.g.,䬼memory consolidation). We review nearly a half century of research across seven diverse correlational and experimental domains that historically have had little crosstalk. Broadly speaking, sleep and cognitive functions are often related in advancing age, though the prevalence of null effects in healthy older adults (including correlations in the unexpected, negative direction) indicates that age may be an effect modifier of these associations. We interpret the literature as suggesting that maintaining good sleep quality, at least in young adulthood and middle age, promotes better cognitive functioning and serves to protect against age-related cognitive declines.
We investigated the factors that predispose or precipitate greater intraindividual variability (IIV) in sleep. We further examined the potential consequences of IIV on overall sleep quality and ...health outcomes, including whether these relationships were found in both self-reported and actigraphy-measured sleep IIV.
In Study 1, 699 US adults completed a Sleep Intra-Individual Variability Questionnaire and self-reported psychosocial, sleep quality, and health outcomes. In Study 2, 100 university students wore actigraphy and completed psychosocial, sleep, and health surveys at multiple timepoints.
In cross-sectional analyses that controlled for mean sleep duration, predisposing/precipitating factors to greater IIV were being an underrepresented racial/ethnic minority (Study 1: F = 13.95, p < .001; Study 2: F = 7.03, p = .009), having greater stress (Study 2: r values ≥ 0.32, p values ≤ .002) or trait vulnerability to stress (Study 1: r values ≥ 0.15, p values < .001), and showing poorer time management (Study 1: r values ≤ -0.12, p values ≤ .004; Study 2: r values ≤ -0.23, p values ≤ .028). In addition, both studies showed that greater sleep IIV was associated with decreased overall sleep quality, independent of mean sleep duration (Study 1: r values ≥ 0.20, p values < .001; Study 2: r values ≥ 0.33, p values ≤ .001). Concordance across subjective and objective IIV measures was modest ( r values = 0.09-0.35) and similar to concordance observed for subjective-objective mean sleep duration measures.
Risk for irregular sleep patterns is increased in specific demographic groups and may be precipitated by, or contribute to, higher stress and time management inefficiencies. Irregular sleep may lead to poor sleep quality and adverse health outcomes, independent of mean sleep duration, underscoring the importance of addressing sleep consistency.
Like many dual process theories in the psychological sciences, existing models of prospective memory (i.e., remembering to execute future intentions) emphasize the role of singular top-down or ...bottom-up processes that act in isolation. We argue that top-down and bottom-up processes are interconnected and dynamically interact to support prospective memory. We elaborate on this dynamic multiprocess framework by focusing on recent behavioral, neuroimaging, and eye-tracking research that demonstrated the dynamic nature of monitoring (top-down) and spontaneous retrieval (bottom-up) processes in relation to contextual factors, metacognition, and individual differences. We conclude that identifying how dual processes interact with environmental and individual difference factors is crucial for advancing understanding of cognition and behavior.
Daylight saving time (DST) constitutes a natural quasi-experiment to examine the influence of mild sleep loss and circadian misalignment. We investigated the acute effects of spring transition into ...DST and the chronic effects of DST (compared to standard time) on medical malpractice claims in the United States over 3 decades.
We analyzed 288,432 malpractice claims from the National Practitioner Data Bank. To investigate the acute effects of spring DST transition, we compared medical malpractice incidents/decisions 1 week before spring DST transition, 1 week following spring DST transition, and the rest of the year. To investigate the chronic effects of DST months, we compared medical malpractice incidents/decisions averaged across the 7-8 months of DST vs the 4-5 months of standard time.
With regard to acute effects, spring DST transitions were significantly associated with higher payment decisions but not associated with the severity of medical incidents. With regard to chronic effects, the 7-8 DST months were associated with higher average payments and worse severity of incidents than the 4-5 standard time months.
The mild sleep loss and circadian misalignment associated with DST may influence the incidence of medical errors and decisions on medical malpractice payments both acutely and chronically.
Gao C, Lage C, Scullin MK. Medical malpractice litigation and daylight saving time.
. 2024;20(6):933-940.
•Prospective memory can be supported by monitoring or spontaneous retrieval.•Monitoring and spontaneous retrieval are dynamically interconnected processes.•Engaging monitoring is dictated by the ...expectation of prospective memory cues.•Incorporating contextual variability highlights the interplay of monitoring and spontaneous retrieval in prospective memory.
The ability to remember to execute delayed intentions is referred to as prospective memory. Previous theoretical and empirical work has focused on isolating whether a particular prospective memory task is supported either by effortful monitoring processes or by cue-driven spontaneous processes. In the present work, we advance the Dynamic Multiprocess Framework, which contends that both monitoring and spontaneous retrieval may be utilized dynamically to support prospective remembering. To capture the dynamic interplay between monitoring and spontaneous retrieval, we had participants perform many ongoing tasks and told them that their prospective memory cue may occur in any context. Following either a 20-min or a 12-h retention interval, the prospective memory cues were presented infrequently across three separate ongoing tasks. The monitoring patterns (measured as ongoing task cost relative to a between-subjects control condition) were consistent and robust across the three contexts. There was no evidence for monitoring prior to the initial prospective memory cue; however, individuals who successfully spontaneously retrieved the prospective memory intention, thereby realizing that prospective memory cues could be expected within that context, subsequently monitored. These data support the Dynamic Multiprocess Framework, which contends that individuals will engage monitoring when prospective memory cues are expected, disengage monitoring when cues are not expected, and that when monitoring is disengaged, a probabilistic spontaneous retrieval mechanism can support prospective remembering.
In the United States, 16 million family caregivers provide long-term care for patients with dementia. Although one's physical, mental, and cognitive health depends on sleep, many caregivers ...experience chronic stress, and stress is typically associated with worse sleep quantity and quality.
To quantify the extent, nature, and treatability of sleep problems in dementia caregivers.
PubMed and Scopus databases were systematically searched for articles published through June 2018 using the following keywords: caregiver or spouse or caretaker AND sleep or circadian AND dementia or Alzheimer. Backward citation tracking was performed, and corresponding authors were contacted for additional data to conduct meta-analyses and pooled analyses.
Two reviewers independently screened 805 studies to identify those that reported sleep duration or sleep quality in caregivers of patients with dementia.
Following the PRISMA guidelines, 2 reviewers independently extracted data from all studies and conducted National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute study quality assessments. Meta-analyses with random-effects models were performed to evaluate sleep duration, sleep quality, and sleep interventions in dementia caregivers.
Sleep quality and total sleep time were measured by polysomnography, actigraphy, and self-report.
Thirty-five studies were analyzed with data from 3268 caregivers (pooled mean age SD of sample means, 63.48 5.99 years; 76.7% female) were analyzed. Relative to age-matched control noncaregiver adults, caregivers had lower sleep durations akin to losing 2.42 to 3.50 hours each week (Hedges g = -0.29; 95% CI, -0.48 to -0.09; P = .01). Sleep quality was significantly lower in caregivers (Hedges g = -0.66; 95% CI, -0.89 to -0.42; P < .001), but caregivers who underwent sleep intervention trials had better sleep quality than caregivers who did not receive a sleep intervention (Hedges g = 0.35; 95% CI, 0.20-0.49; P < .001).
Sleep debt is known to have cumulative associations with physical, mental, and cognitive health; therefore, poor sleep quality in dementia caregivers should be recognized and addressed. Although the caregiving role is stressful and cognitively demanding by its nature, better sleep quality was observed in caregivers who received low-cost behavioral interventions.
•Classical music TMR improves next-day performance on STEM learning content.•TMR is particularly beneficial for test items that measure knowledge transfer/integration.•TMR techniques can potentially ...be used to bridge gender achievement gaps in STEM.
Poor sleep in college students compromises the memory consolidation processes necessary to retain course materials. A solution may lie in targeting reactivation of memories during sleep (TMR). Fifty undergraduate students completed a college-level microeconomics lecture (mathematics-based) while listening to distinctive classical music (Chopin, Beethoven, and Vivaldi). After they fell asleep, we re-played the classical music songs (TMR) or a control noise during slow wave sleep. Relative to the control condition, the TMR condition showed an 18% improvement for knowledge transfer items that measured concept integration (d = 0.63), increasing the probability of “passing” the test with a grade of 70 or above (OR = 4.68, 95%CI: 1.21, 18.04). The benefits of TMR did not extend to a 9-month follow-up test when performance dropped to floor levels, demonstrating that long-term-forgetting curves are largely resistant to experimentally-consolidated memories. Spectral analyses revealed greater frontal theta activity during slow wave sleep in the TMR condition than the control condition (d = 0.87), and greater frontal theta activity across conditions was associated with protection against long-term-forgetting at the next-day and 9-month follow-up tests (rs = 0.42), at least in female students. Thus, students can leverage instrumental music—which they already commonly pair with studying—to help prepare for academic tests, an approach that may promote course success and persistence.
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