SLEEP, DEPRESSION, AND HEALTH RELATED BEHAVIORS

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The research planned for this grant period includes eight separate studies. All of these studies are designed to measure relationships between aspects of sleep and health-related behaviors. For the most part, each of these studies will generate new, and perhaps important, data that should provide useful insights into the health problems that will be considered. Four of these studies focus on using the demonstrated links between sleep and endogenous depression to provide further and needed validation of two major animal models of human depression (i.e., the behavioral despair and learned helplessness models). Specifically, two of these studies are designed to determine whether the induction of either behavioral despair or learned helplessness alters the architecture of sleep in a manner that is consistent with the deviations from normal electrophysiological patterns that characterize the sleep of patients with endogenous depression. The other two studies in this set are designed to measure the effects of REM sleep depression (i.e., a manipulation that has antidepressant effects) on the depressive-like behaviors that rats exhibit subsequent to the induction of either behavioral despair or learned helplessness. The need for valid animal models of human depression is important and obvious. The significance of this set of studies is that their results may provide less ambiguous support for the validity of one or both of these procedures and in so doing, increase confidence in their usefulness in the study of antidepressant treatments. In addition to this set of four studies, two studies using laboratory animals, are proposed to clarify issues that arise from the application of the procedures for one or both of these models, that is, the sensitivity to pain and fearfulness. The results of these studies should enhance the ability to interpret data derived using either of these animal models of human depression. Finally, two large scale questionnaire studies have been proposed. One of these seeks to gain information that is relevant to the understanding and the remediation of the alarming reductions in both the sleep quantity and quality of college students that we have documented over the past two decades, using, for the first time, a design that considers both gender and ethnic identity as variables. The other questionnaire is an amplification of our recently published research that is designed to comprehensively measure the relationships between cigarette smoking and the quantity and the quality of sleep in a manner that permits the covariation of certain factors that have confounded the interpretation of the relationships between cigarette smoking and sleep in previously published studies. Thus the knowledge generated by both of these questionnaire studies should prove to be useful in altering behaviors that may lead to sleep problems.