The Impact of Sleep Patterns on Emotion Regulation in Taiwanese Adolescents

The Impact of Sleep Patterns on Emotion Regulation in Taiwanese Adolescents

Jhih-Ying, Chen

2018

Emotion regulation has been shown in a number of studies to be related to sleep, which often suggested that good sleep quality leads to better emotion regulation. However, research which has empirically documented the link between individuals’ specific sleep patterns/circadian types and emotion regulation among adolescents is scant. Therefore, the aim of this study attempts to explore whether there is an interaction between circadian types and the corresponding peak time on emotion regulation. Participants were 204 boys and 148 girls, who were from 13 to 16 years of age. The present study involved three questionnaires and two modified emotional Stroop tasks, including Facial-Emotional Stroop task and Lexical-Emotional Stroop task, as the assessment of emotion regulation. The analysis of the questionnaires and experiments was conducted through a series of multivariate ANOVA analyses in order to indicate whether there is a main effect of two independent variables or interactions on two emotion regulation. The results showed three main findings. Firstly, ‘morning people’ committed more error on facial tasks than ‘evening people’. Secondly, participants who attended the tasks in the afternoon had faster reaction times on Lexical task than who were tested in the morning. Thirdly, the interaction between circadian types and the corresponding peak time only showed in the evening group. To sum up, this study might be of importance in explaining the relationship between sleep patterns and emotion regulation in adolescents. Nevertheless, further studies for adolescents in investigating circadian types in relation to emotion regulation are needed.

sleep patterns, circadian types, morningness-eveningness, on/off-peak time, emotion regulation, cognitive control, adolescents

Materials
Each participant was asked to complete three online questionnaires about sleep and mood as well as two experimental tasks about emotion regulation. Three questionnaires had been translated into a Chinese version and inspected by a native Chinese-speaking professor in the Department of Psychology at Lancaster University.
Sleep Measures.
Circadian Types Questionnaire. Participants were given a Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire (MEQ) (Horne & Östberg, 1976) to assess when their biological clock can achieve peak alertness, which indicates the better timing for people to behave more efficiently in their work and cognitive, behavioural and emotional functioning (see Appendix A). Three groups were be categorized based on the MEQ score: score > 58 for the morning type, 42 < score < 58 for the Intermediate type and score < 42 for the evening type.
Sleep Quality Questionnaire. To assess whether participants have sleep dysfunction, participants were also asked to fill out the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) (Buysse, Reynolds, Monk, Berman & Kupfer, 1989), which elicited information concerning their sleep quality (see Appendix B). The higher score the participants gain, the poorer sleep quality they have. This score can be used to examine whether people's sleep quality can influence their emotion regulation ability.
Mood Measurements.
Emotional Problems Questionnaire. Participants needed to fill out the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale-21 (DASS-21) (Antony, Bieling, Cox, Enns & Swinson, 1998), which is a self-reported measure to record their mood during over one recent week (see Appendix C). There were three dimensions of negative mood in this questionnaire, including depression, anxiety and stress. Each dimension had an independent score, with a higher score indicating more emotional problems. In this study, three sub-scores were added together to produce a composite measure of emotional difficulties.
Emotion Regulation.
In addition to the questionnaires, participants were requested to complete two modified “Emotional Stroop Tasks”, including the Lexical-Emotional Stroop Task and the Facial-Emotional Stroop Task, as the assessment of their cognitive control in response to emotional stimuli (Isaac, Vrijsen, Eling, van Oostrom, Speckens & Becker, 2012).
Lexical-Emotional Stroop Task. The experiment stimuli consisted of three kinds of emotional words, namely positive, negative and neutral words, each of which had five presentative words (see Table 1), and each word was printed in four colours (blue, green, red and yellow). In order to assess the emotion regulation ability, participants were asked to classify the colour by pressing a different button as fast as they can. For example, when participants see a blue or green word they have to press “Q”, whereas when they see a red or yellow word they have to press “P”. Before presenting the stimulus, a fixpoint lasted 200 ms and was followed by the presented stimulus, which lasted 2000ms to make sure that participants had enough time to react. All emotional-colour words were randomly presented during this task. After participants press the key, feedback showed whether the response was correct, which lasted 500 ms (see Figure 1). Before the 30 real trials, there was a clear instruction about this task and then each participant had six trials for practise to ensure that they indeed understood how to operate this task. All stimuli were translated into Chinese and appeared in font DFKai_SB and in font size 96. The projected stimuli came out on the computer screen and colour words appeared against a black background.
Facial-Emotional Stroop Task. A total number of stimulus was 160 emotional faces which were composed of 10 different identities (5 males and 5 females) x 4 emotions (happy, neutral, angry and sad) x 4 Stroop colours (blue, green, red and yellow) (see Figure 2). Emotional faces were selected from Taiwan Corpora of Chinese emotions and relevant psychophysiological data (Chen, Zhou & Zeng, 2013). It could reduce the cultural difference effectively when Taiwanese participants took the Facial-Emotional Stroop task. As the same as the execution in the Lexical-Emotional Stroop task, participants were also requested to do colour classification by pressing different buttons as fast as they can. For instance, when participants see a blue or green facial expression, they have to press “A”, whereas when they see a red or yellow emotional face they have to press “L”. Before stimulus appeared, a fixpoint showed and lasted 200 ms, which was then followed by the presented stimulus, which lasted 2000ms, to ensure that participants had enough time to respond the stimuli. The Stroop trials consisted of 30 real trials and were randomized per participant. Participants had six extra trials to practice as well before the real trials. Within the trials, participants saw feedback to tell them whether the response was correct for the last trial, which lasted 500 ms (see Figure 3). All facial stimuli were cropped, free from hair or other external accessories that could prevent any distractions during the task. The projected stimuli showed on the computer screen and the coloured facial expression appeared against a black background. Both Lexical and Facial stimulus presentation and response collection were programmed by using PsyToolkit on the website (Stoet, 2010) (see Appendix D and E) and run on Windows computers.
Table 1
Stimuli from the Lexical-Emotional Stroop Task
Positive Neutral Negative
快樂 (Happy)
被愛 (Beloved)
滿足 (Satisfaction)
自豪 (Pride)
舒服 (Comfort) 無聊 (Boredom)
平靜 (Calmness)
驚訝 (Surprise)
疑惑 (Confusion)
害羞 (Shyness) 生氣 (Anger)
焦慮 (Anxiety)
厭惡 (Disgust)
恐懼 (Fear)
悲傷 (Sadness)

Figure 1. The diagram of Lexical-Emotional Stroop Task. In this example, the stimulus is a word of Blue Happy.

Figure 2. Sample happy male stimuli used from the Facial-Emotional Stroop Task.


Figure 3. The diagram of Facial-Emotional Stroop Task. In this example, the stimulus is a male’s face of Blue Happy.
Procedure
This study was approved by the director of the Counselling Department in Mingder High school and combined with the counselling curriculum. All students’ parents were provided with the information sheets (see Appendix F) about this study and an opt-out consent form (see Appendix G) one week prior to it. Only parents who did not want their child to participate in this study needed to sign and return the opt-out consent form. However, no opt-out consent form was returned. Participants were tested in a computer lab, with the researcher and their counselling teacher present. In order to balance the number of classes with the time of test, half of the classes per grade were tested in the morning (8 a.m. to 9 a.m. or 9 a.m. to 10 a.m.), and the others were tested in the afternoon (2 p.m. to 3 p.m. or 3 p.m. to 4 p.m.) (see Table 2). The duration of participation lasted around 45 minutes. Before the beginning of the study, the research topic and aims were presented on each computer screen. Participants were provided an opportunity to ask questions, and then the researcher asked whether anyone was not willing to attend this study. None of the participants were blind as to the aim of this study. Then, participants were given the links to the experiments and questionnaires; they needed to key the links onto the browser and start the study. In order to effectively use their time, participants were requested firstly to complete two Emotional Stroop tasks. Following the experiments, participants were instructed to fill out three questionnaires.

Lancaster University

Data/SPSS.sav

Chen2018

Rebecca James

None

None

English

Data

LA1 4YF

Judith Lunn

MSc

Developmental and Cognitive Psychology

352 Taiwanese adolescents

MANOVA, ANCOVA, ANOVA, chi-square, t-test