Johanna Schwarz

Sleep in everyday life – relationship to mood and performance in young and older adults

In today’s society, many individuals suffer from disturbed and short sleep. Laboratory studies show that sleep deprivation for one night has profound adverse consequences for mood and performance, which appear to be larger in young than older adults. However, much less is known on the impact of day to day variations in sleep that individuals normally encounter in their daily life. Using mobile experience sampling, we will combine accurate real-time repeated measures with a naturalistic setting to address the following research gaps: (i) how variable/stable is everyday sleep in young compared with older adults? (ii) how do daily variations in sleep length and quality impact on both mood and performance in everyday life? (iii) does age play a moderating role in the relationships between sleep, mood and performance? Sleep in 200 young (18-30 years) and 200 older adults (55-70 years) will be measured subjectively and objectively over 3 weeks in the context of their daily life. Participants will several times a day answer questions on their momentary well-being (e.g. mood, sleepiness and stress), and perform an attention task when receiving prompts on their mobile phones. A novel software application to perform the experience sampling will be developed within an interdisciplinary collaboration. The results will improve the understanding of the pivotal role of sleep for well-being and performance ability in everyday life in an ageing population.
Grant administrator
Stockholm University
Reference number
P19-0567:1
Amount
SEK 5,916,000.00
Funding
RJ Projects
Subject
Psychology (excluding Applied Psychology)
Year
2019