The effects of sleep fragmentation on behavioral control of sleeping respiration and on daytime sleepiness were investigated in 20 college students. All were polygraphically monitored both during nighttime sleep and during daytime naps. Ten experimental subjects were informed while awake that tones would be presented to them during nighttime sleep. Their task was to terminate the tones by taking a deep breath. Half of the subjects first received tones every 4 min; the other half received them every 8 min. After 4 consecutive nights subjects received 3 days off and conditions were reversed for 4 more consecutive nights. Tones started at 45dB and, in the absence of a response, increased 10dB every 10 seconds up to 95dB. Control subjects (N = 10) did not receive tones. The absolute number of arousals to tones was greater but the percentage of arousals was lower under the 4‐min condition. Full awakenings occurred infrequently. Probability of making a breathing response remained high across days for both fragmentation conditions, but latency to respond was shorter and probability higher under the 8‐min condition. Sleep fragmentation, whether “frequent” (4‐min) or “infrequent” (8‐min), did not induce greater daytime sleepiness than did the nonfragmentation control condition, and sleepiness did not differ between the two experimental conditions. Implications for developing behavioral techniques for treating sleep‐related breathing disorders are discussed.
Two experiments are presented concerning the control of learned behavior by stimuli presented during sleep. The rule of associative and nonassociative factors was assessed in Experiment 1. Group I was tested to demonstrate that, following instructions during wakefulness, subjects would terminate tones presented during sleep by taking a deep breath. To determine the likelihood of spontaneous responses during the tone, two groups were tested following the same instructions but with tones omitted on every trial (Group II) or every other trial (Group III). To determine whether breathing responses might be due to tone‐elicited arousal. Group IV was tested without instructions to make the breathing response. Reliable responding was found only for Group I. Experiment 2 concerned within‐ and across‐night patterns of responsiveness under the procedure investigated in Experiment 1. Subjects were tested for either 4 consecutive or 4 nonconsecutive nights. Response latencies increased within nights and also across nights with a greater rate of increase on consecutive nights. The data are discussed in relation to the importance of understanding the effects of behavioral demands during sleep.
Study concerned principally with the need to provide normative and psychometric data for the FIRO‐BC questionnaire. Reported are the means, standard deviations, test‐retest reliability coefficients, and interscale correlation coefficients. Data are reported separately for boys and girls (N = 282). In addition, techniques of FIRO‐BC data analyses are reviewed and alternatives are discussed.
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