Neuro-cognitive Psychology and Center of Cognitive Interaction Technology (CITEC), Bielefeld University, Bielefeld, Germany.
PLoS One. 2024 Sep 9;19(9):e0310034. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0310034. eCollection 2024.
Human well-being and functioning depend on two fundamental mental states: Relaxation and sleepiness. Relaxation and sleepiness are both assumed to be states of low physiological arousal and negatively correlated. However, it is still unclear how consistent this negative relationship is across different settings and whether it changes before and after an intervention. Here we investigated this intricate relationship between subjective momentary sleepiness and relaxation states by meta-analytically analyzing several data sets from studies using the Relaxation State Questionnaire. We discovered that subjective sleepiness and relaxation were in fact anti-correlated pre-intervention. This anti-correlation provides a quantitative dissociation between sleepiness and relaxation. Thus, even though sleepiness and relaxation both implicate a low arousal level, the two mental states are subjectively experienced in a qualitatively different fashion, and thus reflect distinct underlying constructs. For the post-intervention relationship, this negative correlation could not be consistently found. This indicates that there are aspects of the experimental setting or intervention that introduce changes in the dynamics of the relationship of the two constructs.
放松和困意。放松和困意都被认为是生理唤醒水平较低的状态，并且呈负相关。然而，这种负相关在不同的环境中是否一致，以及在干预前后是否会发生变化，目前仍不清楚。在这里，我们通过对使用放松状态问卷的研究的多个数据集进行元分析，来研究主观即时困意和放松状态之间这种复杂的关系。我们发现，主观困意和放松在干预前实际上是负相关的。这种负相关提供了困意和放松之间的定量分离。因此，尽管困意和放松都暗示着低唤醒水平，但这两种心理状态在主观上的体验方式是不同的，因此反映了不同的潜在结构。对于干预后的关系，这种负相关并不能始终被发现。这表明实验环境或干预的某些方面会改变这两个结构之间关系的动态。
