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Abstract Study ObjectiveWe investigated sleep disparities and academic achievement in college. MethodsParticipants 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). ResultsThe 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. ConclusionsHigher education should address sleep health early in college to help remove barriers to success and reduce disparities. 

Summary 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. 

Abstract 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. 

The problem driving this debate issue is old, going back to at least to the 17th century. Yet, psychologists are no closer to solving the problem now than they were centuries ago. In this article I argue that the reason for the lack of definitive solution is that disputants share assumptions that make the problem unsolvable. More specifically, the problem is based on the assumptions that (a) the knowledge field of psychology is coherent and (b) natural scientists employ a common inquiry approach. Both are troublesome. As such, instead of asking questions such as “Should psychologists follow the natural sciences?” it would be much more meaningful to ask questions such as “What does it look like for psychologists in this subfield to follow a scientific approach?” 

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.