Extroverts exposed to 12 hours of social interaction were more vulnerable to sleep deprivation than those exposed to isolated activity, U.S. researchers say.
Lead author Tracy L. Rupp -- a psychologist in the Behavioral Biology Branch of the Center for Military Psychiatry and Neuroscience at Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring, Md. -- says the study involved 48 healthy adults ages 18-39. Participants were prescreened using a personality test and divided into introverts and extroverts.
After a night of baseline sleep, participants remained awake for 36 hours, a span that included a 12-hour social-exposure condition followed by 22 hours of sleep deprivation.
"(Extroverts) exposed to socially enriched environments showed greater vulnerability to subsequent sleep deprivation than did extraverts exposed to an identical but socially impoverished environment," Rupp says in a statement. "The ability of introverts to resist sleep loss was relatively unaffected by the social environment. Overall, the present results might also be interpreted more generally to suggest that waking experiences, along with their interaction with individual characteristics, influence vulnerability to subsequent sleep loss."
The study, published in the journal Sleep, finds social interactions are cognitively complex experiences that may lead to rapid fatigue in brain regions that regulate attention and alertness and high levels of social stimulation may be associated with an increase in the need for sleep.
UPI
0 Comments