Consolidating Social Interaction Through Sleep

我们建立社会联系和参与社会互动的能力是日常生活的一个基本方面，我们成功地管理它对我们的身心健康有很大影响。许多研究都考虑了认知能力、社交网络和文化等因素如何影响我们的社会交往。然而，新出现的证据表明，理解社会互动的一个关键部分是我们每天都在做的事情：睡眠。虽然研究已经证明睡眠与各种社会经验有关，但没有人使用严格控制的实验设计来测试这种联系，这意味着我们对睡眠的功能，机制和对我们社会经验的影响知之甚少。鉴于睡眠不足和社会福祉对公共健康的重大影响，这些都是重要的问题。睡眠的功能之一是巩固信息和促进学习（即在最初获得后稳定记忆）。因此，它是我们日常认知功能的基础。睡眠对巩固的好处已经在学习，记忆和语言领域得到了很好的证明。然而，睡眠在巩固社会经验和关系方面可能发挥的作用在很大程度上是未知的。如果睡眠能够重新激活两个陌生人之间互动经历的记忆，这可能会增强这些对话者之间的熟悉感，并改变他们互动的方式。这个项目通过测试一段时间的睡眠与清醒后社会互动的丰富程度来探索睡眠是否以及如何增强社会经验的巩固。在七个实验中，我们试图了解睡眠和社会互动之间是否存在因果关系（包括我们如何获得和修改社会关系），以及这种联系是否对社会/睡眠环境的特征敏感。我们预测，如果睡眠通过巩固对另一个人的记忆来增强社会关系，那么在一段时间的睡眠与清醒之后，更紧密的社会关系（即在谈话中增加协调，增加相互凝视和模仿行为，以及增强对伴侣的喜爱/信任）应该是显而易见的。我们将通过比较即时睡眠和延迟睡眠对社交巩固效应的影响，以及测试短时间的睡眠（即小睡）是否能引起这些效应，来评估社交巩固效应的敏感性，并确定在睡眠期间社交巩固时改变的神经机制。我们预测慢波睡眠将是社会学习效果的最佳预测因子，并测试快速眼动睡眠是否预测了具有情感成分的社会学习。此外，我们将研究是否睡眠巩固效果调制的编码上下文。我们预测，社会关系受损时，对话者被剥夺睡眠相比休息，睡眠相关的社会巩固效果更大时，最初的社会互动发生在合作与竞争的背景下。最后，我们将进行一项大规模的在线研究，通过测试与年龄相关的睡眠和认知处理变化在多大程度上可以预测成年人一生中社会功能的变化，探索认知能力，社会互动和睡眠之间的因果关系。该项目解决了跨多个学科的重要理论问题，包括心理学，语言学，神经科学和哲学。这是不寻常的，因为它将主要集中在良好睡眠的社会和认知影响/机制，而不是睡眠受损的负面结果，为睡眠巩固积极情绪事件记忆的能力提供新的见解，这将有利于公众的健康。

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.