Consolidating Social Interaction Through Sleep

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Our ability to build social connections and engage in social interaction is a fundamental aspect of everyday life, and our success in managing it impacts heavily on our mental and physical health. Much work has considered how factors such as cognitive capacities, social networks and culture influence our social interactions. Emerging evidence suggests, however, that a key piece of the puzzle in understanding social interactions is something that we all do, every single day: sleep. While research has demonstrated that sleep is associated with a variety of social experiences, none has experimentally tested this link using tightly-controlled experimental designs, meaning that we know very little about the function, mechanisms, and effects of sleep on our social experiences. These are important questions given the significant impact of poor sleep and social wellbeing on public health.One of the functions of sleep is to consolidate information and facilitate learning (i.e. to stabilize memories after initial acquisition). As such, it underlies most of our everyday cognitive functions. The benefits of sleep on consolidation have been well documented in the domains of learning, memory and language. However, the role that sleep might play in consolidating social experiences and relationships is largely unknown. If sleep enables the reactivation of memories of an interaction experience between two strangers, this may enhance feelings of familiarity between those interlocutors and alter the way they interact. This project explores whether and how sleep enhances consolidation of social experiences by testing the degree to which social interaction is enriched after a period of sleep vs. wake.Across seven experiments, we seek to understand whether a causal relationship exists between sleep and social interaction (including how we acquire and modify social relationships) and whether this link is sensitive to features of the social/sleep context. We predict that if sleep enhances social relationships by consolidating memories of the other person, then closer social relationships (i.e. increased coordination during conversation, increased mutual gaze and mimicry behaviour, and enhanced likeability/trust for their partner) should be evident following a period of sleep vs. wake. We will assess the sensitivity of these social consolidation effects by comparing effects when sleep is immediate or delayed relative to the initial encounter, and testing whether these effects can be elicited by shorter periods of sleep (i.e. a nap).We will identify the neural mechanisms that are altered when social interaction is consolidated during sleep. We predict that slow-wave sleep will be the best predictor of social learning effects, and test whether rapid-eye movement sleep predicts social learning with an emotional component. In addition, we will examine whether sleep consolidation effects are modulated by the encoding context. We predict that social relationships are impaired when interlocutors are sleep-deprived compared to rested, and that sleep-related social consolidation effects are greater when the initial social interaction occurred within a cooperative vs. competitive context. Finally, we will conduct a large-scale online study to explore the causal connections between cognitive capacities, social interaction and sleep by testing the extent to which age-related changes in sleep and cognitive processing can predict changes in social functioning across the adult lifespan.The project addresses theoretical questions that are important across multiple disciplines, including psychology, linguistics, neuroscience and philosophy. It is unusual in that it will focus primarily on the social and cognitive implications/mechanisms of good sleep rather than the negative outcomes of impaired sleep, providing new insights on the ability of sleep to consolidate memories for positive emotional events that would benefit wellbeing in the general public.