Department of Psychology, University of Zurich, Binzmühlestrasse 14/17, 8050, Zurich, Switzerland.
Department of Psychiatry, Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, Psychiatric Hospital, University of Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland.
Sci Rep. 2024 Jul 27;14(1):17300. doi: 10.1038/s41598-024-68045-y.
Greater loneliness as well as a lack of social connectedness have often been associated with poorer sleep. However, the temporal dynamics and direction of these associations remain unclear. Aim of the current study was to examine bi-directional associations between loneliness/social connectedness and sleep in 48 stress-exposed medical students during their first medical internship, considered a period of heightened stress. We obtained trait-level questionnaire data on loneliness and global sleep completed before and during the internship as well as state-level diary- and wearable-based data on daily changes in social connectedness and sleep collected twice over the period of seven consecutive days, once before and once during the internship. Bi-directional associations among greater loneliness and higher daytime dysfunction on trait-level were identified. In addition, several uni-directional associations between loneliness/social connectedness and sleep were found on trait- and state-level. In sum, findings of this study point at a bi-directional relation among loneliness/social connectedness and sleep, in which variables seem to reciprocally influence each other across longer-term periods as well as on a day-to-day basis.
孤独感加剧以及社交孤立往往与睡眠质量较差有关。然而，这些关联的时间动态和方向仍不清楚。本研究的目的是在考虑到压力增加的时期，即第一次医学生实习期间，研究 48 名处于压力下的医学生中孤独感/社交孤立与睡眠之间的双向关联。我们在实习前和实习期间获得了特质水平的孤独感和整体睡眠问卷数据，以及在实习期间使用日记和可穿戴设备收集的关于社交孤立和睡眠的日常变化的状态水平数据，在连续七天的时间内收集两次，一次在实习前，一次在实习期间。在特质水平上，较高的孤独感与白天功能障碍较高之间存在双向关联。此外，在特质和状态水平上还发现了孤独感/社交孤立与睡眠之间的几个单向关联。总之，这项研究的结果表明，孤独感/社交孤立与睡眠之间存在双向关系，在较长时间内以及在日常基础上，变量似乎会相互影响。
