Sleep in a time of COVID-19

This award supports ongoing research in the Sleep, Language and Memory (SLAM) lab, in the Department of Psychology, into the roles that sleep plays throughout the lifespan, from language learning to emotional processing. As a team, we are particularly interested in the importance of sleep in childhood: a time when sleep difficulties are common, and the effects of sleep deprivation are substantial. The disruption to normal patterns of socialisation, schooling, and physical activity from the COVID-19 pandemic are likely to have had a significant impact on children’s wellbeing, including levels of anxiety, and by extension it is predicted to their quality of sleep. Our lab therefore initiated an online questionnaire study of how children’s anxiety and sleep were being affected by changes in the infection rate. Between April 15th and May 31st, 300 parents completed the questionnaire and gave us permission to recontact them in the summer in the event that we would be able to collect follow-up data. This funding will enable us to perform this follow-up and then analyse the responses collected from both rounds of data collection.