Consolidating Social Interaction Through Sleep

我们建立社会关系和参与社会互动的能力是日常生活的一个基本方面，我们能否成功地管理它对我们的身心健康有很大影响。许多研究已经考虑了认知能力、社交网络和文化等因素如何影响我们的社交互动。然而，新出现的证据表明，在理解社交互动时，关键的一块是我们每天都会做的事情：睡眠。虽然研究已经证明睡眠与各种社交体验有关，但还没有人使用严格控制的实验设计对这种联系进行实验测试，这意味着我们对睡眠的功能、机制和对社交体验的影响知之甚少。这些都是重要的问题，因为睡眠不良和社会福利对公众健康有重大影响。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，它构成了我们大多数日常认知功能的基础。巩固睡眠的好处已经在学习、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人际关系方面可能起到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和醒来后社交互动的丰富程度，来探索睡眠是否以及如何增强社交体验的巩固。通过七个实验，我们试图了解睡眠和社交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交/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(即在交谈中加强协调，增加相互凝视和模仿行为，以及对伴侣的亲和力/信任度)应该会很明显。我们将评估这些社会巩固效应的敏感性，方法是比较与初次相遇时立即或延迟睡眠的影响，并测试较短的睡眠时间(即午睡)是否会引发这些影响。我们将确定当社会互动在睡眠期间巩固时发生变化的神经机制。我们预测，慢波睡眠将是社会学习效果的最佳预测因子，并测试快眼运动睡眠是否预测具有情绪成分的社会学习。此外，我们还将研究睡眠巩固效应是否受编码环境的影响。我们预测，当对话者缺乏睡眠而不是休息时，社会关系会受到损害，而当最初的社会互动发生在合作环境中而不是竞争环境中时，与睡眠相关的社会巩固效应会更大。最后，我们将进行一项大规模的在线研究，通过测试睡眠和认知过程中与年龄相关的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，来探索认知能力、社交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。它的不同寻常之处在于，它将主要关注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，为睡眠巩固对积极情绪事件的记忆的能力提供了新的见解，这将使普通公众受益。

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.