Effect of Sleep Deprivation on Emerging Adults

Introduction

Studying the impact sleep, or rather a lack of sleep, will have on the development of college students in the cognitive, emotional, social, and physiological development domain.

1. Emerging adulthood – in between phase between adolescence and early adulthood.
2. Sleep is a critical aspect of life – right amount of sleep shapes life as students grow up.

Important to understand how emerging adults feel and act. Sleep takes up around ⅓ of adult life, so important to study its impact on emerging adults.

Paper will discuss how lack of sleep affects cognitive abilities and educational grades, encourages negative emotions (quicker to anger, shorter tolerance), decreases social interaction, and is critical to human physiology.

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Cognitive Development Domain

Lack of sleep significantly diminishes cognitive abilities, including neural processes such as remembering, problem solving, critical thinking, and decision making.

Psychologists from the Bradley University conducted an experiment, comparing the students’ self-evaluation of their concentration, effort, and performance with their actual results (Pilcher & Walters, 1997).

18 male and 26 female students from the psychology department, who were on average 20.4 years of age, volunteered to participate in this study.

Given a Watson-Glaser Critical Thinking Appraisal (WG for short) to test their cognitive abilities; later answered a short psychological variables questionnaire to evaluate their own concentration, effort, and performance on the WG test.

Sleep-deprived students performed, on average, significantly worse on the WG than non-deprived students – 24.52 vs 38.71 respectively. Scored out of 40.

In answering the questionnaire, sleep-deprived rated themselves more negatively on every category, on average, versus non-deprived (scored out of 20): Tension – 14.22 vs. 11.19; Depression – 11.96 vs. 9.86; Anger – 11.65 vs. 8.00; Vigor – 16.87 vs. 17.86; Fatigue – 12.35 vs 7.95; Confusion – 10.65 vs. 5.95.

Clear that sleep-deprived students had significantly worse concentration and effort, and scored lower in critical thinking tests. Lower cognitive ability may potentially impact the emotional states of emerging adults.

Emotional Development Domain

Chronic sleep deprivation negatively affects the emotional domain, which could include a decrease in empathy, increase in negative emotions, and increased mood swings.

Psychologists at Oxford University studied the impact sleep deprivation had on how well emerging adults were able to recognize human facial expressions (Van der Helm, Gujar, & Walker 2010).

37 participants ages 18-25 (21 females and 16 males) were randomly separated into a sleep control group and a total sleep deprived group. Evaluated 3 different affective face categories, sad, happy, and angry, on a spectrum ranging from neutral to extremely emotional.

Sleep deprived group were significantly more numb in recognizing happy and angry expressions than the sleep control group; no change in recognizing sad expressions. Sleep-deprived vs. control group results for emotional intensity (out of 4): Happy – 2.31 vs 2.53; Angry – 2.41 vs. 2.66; Sad – 2.35 vs 2.39 respectively. Results were ameliorated after one night of recovery sleep.

Sleep deprivation impairs the accurate judgement of human facial expressions, also known as empathy. Being more emotionally numb may affect how emerging adults perform in social situations.

Social Development Domain

The social development domain is a crucial aspect in the lives of emerging adults. Lack of sleep throughout adolescence can affect social interactions as emerging adults.

According to a study conducted by child and adolescent psychologists, persistent sleep problems in childhood was a good predictor of social anxiety and depression as an emerging adulthood (Gregory, Caspi, Eley, Moffitt, Poulton, & O’Connor 2005).

Parents of 943 children between 7 and 10 years of age (52% of whom were male) provided sleep information of their children; when the children were 21 years of age, they were tested for adult social anxiety and depression.

Childhood sleep problems in childhood was a good predictor of social anxiety (95% Confidence Interval had a p value of .030) and depression (95% Confidence Interval had a p value of .041).

References

1. Munsey, C. (2006, June). Emerging Adults: The In-Between Age. Retrieved from https://www.apa.org/monitor/jun06/emerging.aspx
2. http://www.citationmachine.net/bibliographies/359046552?new=true
3. https://www.psychreg.org/sleep-deprivation-social-life/
4. Pilcher, J. J., & Walters, A. S. (1997). How sleep deprivation affects psychological variables. Journal of American College Health, 46(3), 121. Retrieved from http://libaccess.sjlibrary.org/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=9712114145&site=ehost-live&scope=site
5. Van der Helm, E., Gujar, N., & Walker, M. (2010). Sleep Deprivation Impairs the Accurate Recognition of Human Emotions. Sleep Research Society at Oxford University, 33(3), 335. Retrieved from https://academic.oup.com/sleep/article/33/3/335/2513714
6. Gregory, A. M., Caspi, A., Eley, T. C., Moffitt, T. E., Poulton, R., & O’Connor, T. G. (2005). Prospective longitudinal associations between persistent sleep problems in childhood and anxiety and depression disorders in adulthood. Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 33(2), 157–163. Retrieved from https://doi.org/10. 1007/s10802-005-1824-O