Self‐reported sleep patterns and quality amongst adolescents: cross‐sectional and prospective associations with anxiety and depression

Background Sleep problems are common in adolescence, and frequently comorbid with both anxiety and depression. Research studies have suggested a bidirectional relationship between sleep and psychopathology, which includes evidence that sleep interventions can alleviate symptoms of anxiety and depression. However, little is known about the nature of sleep problems amongst adolescents with anxiety and depression, and whether specific sleeping difficulties are involved in the longitudinal relationship between sleep, anxiety and depression. Method The sample was derived from the Avon Longitudinal Study of Parents and Children (ALSPAC), a population‐based, prospective, birth cohort study of children born in 1991–1992. Data were explored from a subset of participants who took part in a clinical assessment at age 15, on self‐report sleep patterns and quality, and diagnostic outcomes of anxiety and depression (N = 5,033). Subsequent diagnostic and symptom severity data on anxiety and depression at ages 17, 21 and 24 were also examined. Results Cross‐sectional and longitudinal analyses were conducted to explore the relationship between sleep problems, anxiety and depression. Results revealed that adolescents aged 15 with depression experience difficulties with both sleep patterns and sleep quality, whereas adolescents with anxiety only reported problems with sleep quality. A range of sleep variables at age 15 predicted the severity of anxiety and depression symptoms and the diagnoses of anxiety and depressive disorders at age 17, 21 and 24 years. Conclusions The results provide further insight into the nature of sleep problems amongst adolescents with anxiety and depression, and the prospective relationship between sleep disturbance and future psychopathology. These data suggest that targeting sleep difficulties during adolescence may have long‐term mental health benefits

Enhancing Urban Mobility: Integrating Ride-sharing and Public Transit

Seamless integration of ride-sharing and public transit may offer fast, reliable, and affordable transfer to and from transit stations in suburban areas thereby enhancing mobility of residents. We investigate the potential benefits of such a system, as well as the ride-matching technology required to support it, by means of an extensive computational study

The Benefits of Meeting Points in Ride-sharing Systems

We investigate the potential benefits of introducing meeting points in a ride-sharing system. With meeting points, riders can be picked up and dropped off either at their origin and destination or at a meeting point that is within a certain distance from their origin or destination. The increased flexibility results in additional feasible matches between drivers and riders, and allows a driver to be matched with multiple riders without increasing the number of stops the driver needs to make. We design and implement an algorithm that optimally matches drivers and riders in large-scale ride- sharing systems with meeting points. We perform an extensive simulation study to assess the benefits of meeting points. The results demonstrate that meeting points can significantly increase the number of matched participants as well as the system-wide driving distance savings in a ride-sharing system

Large-Scale Sleep Condition Analysis Using Selfies from Social Media

Sleep condition is closely related to an individual's health. Poor sleep conditions such as sleep disorder and sleep deprivation affect one's daily performance, and may also cause many chronic diseases. Many efforts have been devoted to monitoring people's sleep conditions. However, traditional methodologies require sophisticated equipment and consume a significant amount of time. In this paper, we attempt to develop a novel way to predict individual's sleep condition via scrutinizing facial cues as doctors would. Rather than measuring the sleep condition directly, we measure the sleep-deprived fatigue which indirectly reflects the sleep condition. Our method can predict a sleep-deprived fatigue rate based on a selfie provided by a subject. This rate is used to indicate the sleep condition. To gain deeper insights of human sleep conditions, we collected around 100,000 faces from selfies posted on Twitter and Instagram, and identified their age, gender, and race using automatic algorithms. Next, we investigated the sleep condition distributions with respect to age, gender, and race. Our study suggests among the age groups, fatigue percentage of the 0-20 youth and adolescent group is the highest, implying that poor sleep condition is more prevalent in this age group. For gender, the fatigue percentage of females is higher than that of males, implying that more females are suffering from sleep issues than males. Among ethnic groups, the fatigue percentage in Caucasian is the highest followed by Asian and African American.Comment: 2017 International Conference on Social Computing, Behavioral-Cultural Modeling, & Prediction and Behavior Representation in Modeling and Simulation (SBP-BRiMS'17

Toward a consensus definition of pathological video-gaming: a systematic review of psychometric assessment tools

Pathological video-gaming, or its proposed DSM-V classification of "Internet Use Disorder", is of increasing interest to scholars and practitioners in allied health disciplines. This systematic review was designed to evaluate the standards in pathological video-gaming instrumentation, according to Cicchetti (1994) and Groth-Marnat's (2009) criteria and guidelines for sound psychometric assessment. A total of 63 quantitative studies, including eighteen instruments and representing 58,415 participants, were evaluated. Results indicated that reviewed instrumentation may be broadly characterized as inconsistent. Strengths of available measures include: (i) short length and ease of scoring, (ii) excellent internal consistency and convergent validity, and (iii) potentially adequate data for development of standardized norms for adolescent populations. However, key limitations included: (a) inconsistent coverage of core addiction indicators, (b) varying cut-off scores to indicate clinical status, (c) a lack of a temporal dimension, (d) untested or inconsistent dimensionality, and (e) inadequate data on predictive validity and inter-rater reliability. An emerging consensus suggests that pathological video-gaming is commonly defined by (1) withdrawal, (2) loss of control, and (3) conflict. It is concluded that a unified approach to assessment of pathological video-gaming is needed. A synthesis of extant research efforts by meta-analysis may be difficult in the context of several divergent approaches to assessment.Daniel L. King, Maria C. Haagsma, Paul H. Delfabbro, Michael Gradisar, Mark D. Griffith

Using big data to explore worldwide trends in objective sleep in the transition to adulthood

Background: Development induces changes in sleep, and its duration has been reported to change as a function of aging. Additionally, sleep timing is a marker of pubertal maturation, where during adolescence, the circadian rhythm shifts later. Typically, this is manifested in a later sleep onset in the evening and later awakening in the morning. These changes across development seem to be universal around the world but are unlikely to persist into adulthood. Methods: This study utilized accelerometer data from 17,355 participants aged 16-30 years (56% female) measured by validated Polar wearables over a 14-day period. We compared sleep duration, chronotype (sleep midpoint) and weekend catch-up (ie, social jetlag) sleep across ages and regions over 242,948 nights. Results: The data indicate a decline in sleep duration as well as a dramatic shift in sleep onset times throughout adolescence. This continues well into early adulthood and stabilizes nearer age 30. Differences in sleep duration across ages were significant, and ranged from 7:53 h at age 16 to 7:29 h at age 30 in the sample. Additionally, there was a clear difference between females and males throughout adolescence and young adulthood: girls had longer sleep duration and earlier timed sleep in the current study. Differences in sleep were found between regions across the world, and across European areas. Conclusions: Both sleep duration and sleep timing go through a clear developmental pattern, particularly in early adulthood. Females had an earlier sleep midpoint and obtained more sleep. Regional differences in sleep occurred across the world. Crown Copyright (C) 2019 Published by Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.Peer reviewe

Facebook use and sleep quality: light interacts with socially induced alertness

It has been demonstrated that the use of social networking sites late at night can lead to sleep related problems that extend into the next day. A common explanation is that the light emitted from screens is disrupting the users’ circadian rhythms. An alternative explanation is that the social cognition inherent in the use of social networking sites is responsible. Here the two factors were looked at together. Participants used Facebook on iPad tablets before sleep. This was done on different nights with two lighting conditions and with two levels of content. In the ‘light’ condition, blue wavelength light was manipulated so that it was either full wavelength or blue light filtered. In the ‘alertness’ condition the personal significance of the content was changed, from personally relevant to irrelevant. A modified version of the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index was used to measure sleep related problems. No evidence was found that simply filtering blue light or simply removing relevant content improved sleep quality. However, the two factors interacted. The results suggest that the light emitted from screens can affect sleep quality under some conditions but this is behaviourally irrelevant in the context of normal Facebook usage

Mechanisms Influencing Older Adolescents’ Bedtimes during Videogaming: The Roles of Game Difficulty and Flow

This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ This author accepted manuscript is made available following 12 month embargo from date of publication (August 2017) in accordance with the publisher’s archiving policyA relationship between evening technology use and sleep has been established, and models suggest various mechanisms to explain this relationship. Recent updates to these models also suggest the influence of individual difference factors, such that the relationship between technology and sleep varies between young people. Flow is an experience of immersion and time distortion that could vary between adolescents when using technology. The aim of the present study was to investigate the effects of flow on the self-selected bedtimes of adolescents when videogaming. Seventeen older adolescent, experienced videogamers (age = 15.9 ± 0.83 years), played a new videogame on two school-night evenings in a sleep laboratory. Game difficulty was set to “hard” one evening (flow condition) and “easy” on the other evening (disrupted flow). Trait and state flow were measured, along with heart rate during videogaming, and bedtime measured objectively with real-time cameras. An interaction effect for heart rate indicated an elevated heart rate in the easy condition after 150 min of gaming (p < 0.02). No significant differences were found in bedtimes between the easy and hard conditions (p = 0.77). Adolescents high on trait flow played for longer and selected significantly later bedtimes than their low trait flow peers but only for the hard (flow) condition (12:22 AM vs. 10:53 PM, p = 0.004). Similarly, adolescents with high state flow went to bed significantly later than those low on state flow (12:24 PM vs. 10:52 PM, p = 0.001), again only in the hard condition. These findings suggest that individual and situational characteristics may amplify the effects of technology use on the “sleep” of adolescents and provides support for the displacement of bedtime hypothesis

Readiness to change and commitment as predictors of therapy compliance in adolescents with Delayed Sleep-Wake Phase Disorder

© 2018 Elsevier B.V. This manuscript version is made available under the CC-BY-NC-ND 4.0 license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ 12 month embargo from date of publication (Dec 2018) per publisher’s policyObjectives Recent evidence indicates that adolescents' motivation to change sleep-wake patterns is low, despite significant impact of adolescent sleep problems on many areas of daytime functioning. The aim of the present study is to evaluate components of adolescents' motivation, and subsequent changes in behaviour. Methods Fifty-six adolescents, aged 13–23 (M = 15.8 ± 2.3 y; 38% m) diagnosed with Delayed Sleep-Wake Phase Disorder (DSWPD) underwent three therapy sessions involving bright light therapy to phase advance sleep patterns. Adolescents were instructed to advance wake-up times by 30-min daily. Motivation ratings of desire, ability, reason, need and commitment to change sleep patterns were taken at baseline. Sleep diaries were taken at the end of treatment session 1, with sequentially earlier wake-up times in 30-min intervals indicating compliance. Results At the outset of therapy, adolescents indicated strong desire, reasons and need, yet moderate ability and commitment to advance their sleep-wake patterns. Following therapy, sleep-onset times were significantly advanced, total sleep time increased and sleep latency decreased (all p 0.05). Adolescents' desire to change (r = 0.30, p = 0.03) and commitment (r = 0.30, p = 0.03) were positively correlated with behaviour change, but their need, ability and reasons were not. A mediation analysis showed that ability and desire were important in predicting behaviour change, by total effects through commitment (ie, indirectly and directly). Conclusion Our findings suggest that the total effects of ability (ie, confidence) and desire to change are the best predictors of behavioural changes, thus clinicians should focus on these components of the readiness to change model when undertaking treatments with sleep-disordered adolescents

Games for health for children - current status and needed research

Videogames for health (G4H) offer exciting, innovative, potentially highly effective methods for increasing knowledge, delivering persuasive messages, changing behaviors, and influencing health outcomes. Although early outcome results are promising, additional research is needed to determine the game design and behavior change procedures that best promote G4H effectiveness and to identify and minimize possible adverse effects. Guidelines for ideal use of different types of G4H by children and adolescents should be elucidated to enhance effectiveness and minimize adverse effects. G4H stakeholders include organizational implementers, policy makers, players and their families, researchers, designers, retailers, and publishers. All stakeholders should be involved in G4H development and have a voice in setting goals to capitalize on their insights to enhance effectiveness and use of the game. In the future, multiple targeted G4H should be available to meet a population's diverse health needs in developmentally appropriate ways. Substantial, consistent, and sophisticated research with appropriate levels of funding is needed to realize the benefits of G4H