14 DAY TRIAL // In a first-of-its-kind research, experts determined that each person's personality traits and social activity patterns interact to determine that person's vulnerability to experiencing sleep deprivation.
The new research paper, which appears in the November 1 issue of the esteemed scientific journal SLEEP, is the first to show that such a correlation exist, and to investigate the issue in depth.
After more than 12 hours of continuous social interactions, extroverts were a lot more likely to display symptoms associated with sleep deprivation than other extroverts who were allowed to carry out isolated activities for the same amount of time.
For the new investigation, researchers asked extroverts, and a control group of introverts, to undertake a common Psychomotor Vigilance Task (PVT). The introverts' speed at solving the test was the same regardless of prior social exposure.
But the extrovert groups showed a lot of differences. Those who had been exposed to a social environment fared a lot worse than their peers at tests taken at 4, 6 and 12 am.
“Extroverts exposed to socially enriched environments showed greater vulnerability to subsequent sleep deprivation than did extroverts exposed to an identical but socially impoverished environment,” explains scientist Tracy L. Rupp, PhD.
She holds an appointment as a research psychologist at the Behavioral Biology Branch of the Center for Military Psychiatry and Neuroscience at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring, Maryland.
The expert was also the principal investigator on the study, and the lead author of the SLEEP paper. “The ability of introverts to resist sleep loss was relatively unaffected by the social environment,” she says.
“Overall, the present results might also be interpreted more generally to suggest that waking experiences, along with their interaction with individual characteristics, influence vulnerability to subsequent sleep loss,” Rupp argues.
The new study was conducted on a batch of 48 adults aged 18 to 39, who were first allowed to sleep fully for one night in the lab, so that the researchers could collect baseline measurements of their behavior while they were resting.
The participants were then exposed to their respective environments, and the PVT tests were administered afterwards, Science Blog reports.