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We investigated sleep disparities and academic achievement in college.

Participants were 6,002 first-year college students attending a midsize private university in the southern United States [62.0% female, 18.8% first-generation, 37.4% Black, Indigenous, or People of Color (BIPOC) students]. During the first 3–5 weeks of college, students reported their typical weekday sleep duration, which we classified as short sleep (<7 hours), normal sleep (7–9 hours), or long sleep (>9 hours).

The odds for short sleep were significantly greater in BIPOC students (95% CI: 1.34–1.66) and female students (95% CI: 1.09–1.35), and the odds for long sleep were greater in BIPOC students (95% CI: 1.38–3.08) and first-generation students (95% CI: 1.04–2.53). In adjusted models, financial burden, employment, stress, STEM academic major, student athlete status, and younger age explained unique variance in sleep duration, fully mediating disparities for females and first-generation students (but only partially mediating disparities for BIPOC students). Short and long sleep predicted worse GPA across students’ first year in college, even after controlling for high school academic index, demographics, and psychosocial variables.

Higher education should address sleep health early in college to help remove barriers to success and reduce disparities.

 

Informal learning settings such as museums provide unique opportunities for educating a local community about sleep. However, in such settings, information must be capable of immediately inciting interest. We developed a series of sleep “icebreakers” (brief, informal facts) to determine whether they elicited interest in sleep and encouraged behavioural change. There were 859 participants across three cross‐sectional samples: (a) members of the local museum; (b) Mechanical Turk workers who responded to a “sleep” study advertisement; and (c) Mechanical Turk workers who responded to a “various topics” study advertisement that did not mention sleep. All three samples demonstrated high interest in sleep topics, though delayed recall of the icebreakers was strongest in participants who expected to learn about the sleep topics. Icebreaker interest ratings were independent of age, gender and race/ethnicity, suggesting that sleep is a topic of universal interest. Importantly, regardless of demographics and sample, the more the icebreakers interested the participants, the more likely participants were to indicate willingness to donate to a sleep exhibit, change their sleep behaviours, and post to social media. Thus, sleep icebreakers can rapidly elicit people's interest, and future outreach efforts should couple icebreakers with opportunities for subsequent personalized learning.

 

Violent behavior, police brutality, and racial discrimination are currently at the forefront of society’s attention, and they should be. We investigated whether mild sleep loss—as typical for many adults throughout the work week—could aggravate the socio-emotional-cognitive processes contributing to violence and discrimination. In a sample of 40 healthy young adults, we either experimentally restricted participants’ sleep for four nights (6.2 h/night) or let participants obtain normal sleep (7.7 h/night)—and then had them complete the Police Officer’s Dilemma Task. In this computerized task, the participant must rapidly decide to shoot or not shoot at White and Black men who either are or are not holding a gun. Results showed significant racial biases, including more and quicker shooting of Black targets compared to White targets. Furthermore, signal detection analyses demonstrated that mild sleep restriction changed participants’ decision criterion, increasing the tendency to shoot, even when controlling for psychomotor vigilance, fluid intelligence, and self-reported desirability to behave in a socially acceptable manner. The increased tendency to shoot was also observed in participants who reported believing that they had adapted to the sleep loss. Future experimental research using trained police officers will help establish the generalizability of these laboratory effects. Importantly, sleep loss is modifiable via organization-level changes (e.g., shift scheduling, light entrainment) and individual-level interventions (e.g., sleep hygiene education, incentives for behavioral change), suggesting that if sleep loss is corrected, it could save lives—including Black lives.

 

Beginning in early 2020, the novel coronavirus was the subject of frequent and sustained news coverage. Building on prior literature on the stress-inducing effects of consuming news during a large-scale crisis, we used network analysis to investigate the association between coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) news consumption, COVID-19-related psychological stress, worries about oneself and one’s loved ones getting COVID-19, and sleep quality. Data were collected in March 2020 from 586 adults (45.2% female; 72.9% White) recruited via Amazon Mechanical Turk in the U.S. Participants completed online surveys assessing attitudes and behaviors related to COVID-19 and a questionnaire assessing seven domains of sleep quality. Networks were constructed using partial regularized correlation matrices. As hypothesized, COVID-19 news consumption was positively associated with COVID-19-related psychological stress and concerns about one’s loved ones getting COVID-19. However, there were very few associations between COVID-19 news consumption and sleep quality indices, and gender did not moderate any of the observed relationships. This study replicates and extends previous findings that COVID-19-news consumption is linked with psychological stress related to the pandemic, but even under such conditions, sleep quality can be spared due to the pandemic allowing for flexibility in morning work/school schedules. 

Many people listen to music for hours every day, often near bedtime. We investigated whether music listening affects sleep, focusing on a rarely explored mechanism: involuntary musical imagery (earworms). In Study 1 ( N = 199, mean age = 35.9 years), individuals who frequently listen to music reported persistent nighttime earworms, which were associated with worse sleep quality. In Study 2 ( N = 50, mean age = 21.2 years), we randomly assigned each participant to listen to lyrical or instrumental-only versions of popular songs before bed in a laboratory, discovering that instrumental music increased the incidence of nighttime earworms and worsened polysomnography-measured sleep quality. In both studies, earworms were experienced during awakenings, suggesting that the sleeping brain continues to process musical melodies. Study 3 substantiated this possibility by showing a significant increase in frontal slow oscillation activity, a marker of sleep-dependent memory consolidation. Thus, some types of music can disrupt nighttime sleep by inducing long-lasting earworms that are perpetuated by spontaneous memory-reactivation processes. 

Abstract Sleep spindles are a physiological marker of off-line memory consolidation. In young adults, sleep spindles are preferentially responsive to encoded information that is tagged as having future relevance. Older adults, on the other hand, show reduced capacity for future simulation and alterations in sleep physiology. Healthy young adults (n = 38) and older adults (n = 28) completed an adaptation night, followed by two in-laboratory polysomnography nights, in which they mentally simulated future events or remembered past events, recorded via written descriptions. We quantified the degree of future/past thinking using linguistic analysis of time orientation. In young adults, greater future thinking was linked to greater spindle density, even when controlling for gender, age, and word count (rp = .370, p = .028). The opposite was true for older adults, such that greater future thinking was associated with reduced spindle density (rp = −.431, p = .031). These patterns were selective to future thinking (not observed for past thinking). The collective findings implicate an impaired interaction between future relevance tagging and sleep physiology as a mechanism by which aging compromises sleep-dependent cognitive processing.