The impact of sleep deprivation and anxiety on social understanding and social functioning

睡眠不足和焦虑构成了重大的经济和社会挑战。睡眠不足每年使英国经济损失1.3-1.9%的国内生产总值，并造成严重的健康和社会后果。常见的心理健康问题，如焦虑，每年造成1760万天的病假，使国内生产总值减少约1.3%。除此之外，睡眠不足和焦虑的间接代价是我们的社会理解、社会互动和社会关系的代价。理解他人的观点、信仰、欲望和感受是很重要的。人类在这方面的老练是导致我们作为一个物种成功的原因之一。我们生活在一个大的社区里，为了共同的目标而合作。我们向别人学习，教育我们的孩子，关心那些比我们更脆弱的人。这些活动都依赖于我们对他人所见、所信、所想或所感的理解。有时别人会告诉我们这些信息，但有时我们不得不从他们的行为方式中推断出来。日常经验表明，睡眠不足和焦虑会影响我们的社会理解能力。谁没有注意到焦虑的学生在等待考试时紧张地忽视彼此呢？我们中有多少人曾经因为在临近截止日期而过度劳累而忘记给母亲寄生日卡而向她道歉？新出现的实验证据支持这样的观点：睡眠不足和焦虑会改变我们对社会的理解，那些长期有睡眠问题或焦虑经历的人会遇到社交困难。不太清楚的是，睡眠和焦虑究竟如何影响我们的社会理解，以及这些经历的可变性如何影响我们的长期社会功能。与文献一致的一个假设是，焦虑使我们更加自私，鼓励我们专注于自己的观点，而牺牲他人的观点。另一种解释是，睡眠不足会让我们更加困惑，难以区分自己和他人的观点。第三，那些睡眠质量更好、焦虑程度更低的人从长远来看会表现得更好，因为他们更了解别人。为了研究睡眠剥夺的影响，我们将在让人们整夜保持清醒后，对他们进行三项任务测试。这些任务将考察他们思考他人想法和感受的能力。他们的反应将提供有关睡眠剥夺是否导致他们难以区分自己和他人的想法和感受的信息。为了研究焦虑的影响，我们会让人们产生焦虑，然后让他们做同样的任务。人们会通过回忆和写下他们感到焦虑的时间而感到焦虑。在这里，我们预测人们的反应将显示出他们在判断中越来越自私的迹象。为了研究长期的、日常的焦虑倾向、睡眠不足和社交困难之间的关系，参与者将完成一些问卷调查和简短的实验任务。我们将使用复杂的统计模型来测试人们在这些方面的特征之间的关系。这些实验中的每一个都将为日常经历如何影响我们的社会理解提供令人兴奋的新证据。他们还将为研究开辟新的途径，研究这些发现的影响。更清晰的证据表明，睡眠不足和焦虑影响社会理解的方式与临床人群（如失眠、广泛性焦虑症和自闭症患者）高度相关。此外，专业人群，如新手父母、初级医生或战场上的士兵，在做出关键的社会判断的同时，不得不经历睡眠不足和焦虑。我们的项目提供的新颖见解将为理解他们的能力如何受到影响提供一个模型。

Poor sleep and anxiety pose significant economic and social challenges. Inadequate sleep costs the UK economy 1.3-1.9% of Gross Domestic Product each year and has significant health and social consequences. Common mental health difficulties, such as anxiety, account for 17.6 million sick days yearly and reduce GDP by around 1.3%. Additional to this are the indirect costs of poor sleep and anxiety - the costs to our social understanding, social interaction and social relationships. Understanding other people's perspectives, beliefs, desires and feelings is important. The sophistication with which humans do this is one of the things that has led to our success as a species. We live in large communities and cooperate to meet shared goals. We learn from others, teach our children and care for those more vulnerable than ourselves. Each of these activities relies on our understanding of what other people see, believe, want or feel. Sometimes others tell us this information, but sometimes we have to infer it from the way they act. Everyday experience suggests poor sleep and anxiety affect our social understanding. Who has not noticed anxious students nervously ignoring each other as they wait for an exam? How many of us have spent time apologizing to our mothers when we forgot to send them a birthday card because we were exhausted after over-working towards a deadline? Emerging experimental evidence supports the suggestion that sleep deprivation and anxiety can change our social understanding and that those with long-term experiences of sleep problems or anxiety experience social difficulties. What is less clear is exactly how sleep and anxiety impact on our social understanding and how variability in these experiences impacts our longer-term social functioning. One hypothesis that is consistent with the literature is that anxiety makes us more selfish, encouraging us to focus on our own point of view at the expense of others. Another is that sleep deprivation makes us more muddled, making it harder to distinguish between our own point of view and other people's. A third is that those with better sleep and lower levels of anxiety will function better in the longer term because they understand people better.To look at the impact of sleep deprivation, we will test people on three tasks, after having them remain awake for a whole night. The tasks will investigate their ability to think about other people's thoughts and feelings. Their responses will be informative as to whether sleep deprivation has caused them to have difficulties in distinguishing between their own thoughts and feelings, and other people's. To look at the impact of anxiety, we will induce anxiety in people and then have them do the very same tasks. People will be made anxious by recalling and writing about a time they felt anxious. Here, we predict people's responses will show evidence of increased selfishness in their judgments. To look at the relationship between long-term, everyday tendencies towards anxiety and poor sleep, and social difficulties, participants will complete a number of questionnaires and short experimental tasks. We will use sophisticated statistical modelling to test the relationship between people's traits in these areas.Each of these experiments will provide exciting new evidence for how everyday experiences impact on our social understanding. They will also open up new avenues for investigation, looking at the impact of these findings. Clearer evidence for the way in which poor sleep and anxiety impact social understanding is highly relevant to clinical populations, such as those with insomnia, generalized anxiety disorder and autism. Further, specialist populations, such as new parents, junior doctors or soldiers in combat have to experience poor sleep and anxiety at the same time as making crucial social judgments. The novel insights offered by our project will provide a model for understanding how their abilities are affected.