Abstract
Transient affect can be tightly linked with people’s global life satisfaction (i.e., affect globalizing). This volatile judgment style leaves life satisfaction vulnerable to the inevitable highs and lows of everyday life, and has been associated with lower psychological health. The present study examines a potentially fundamental but untested regulatory role of sleep: insulating people’s global life satisfaction from the affective highs and lows of daily life. We tested this hypothesis in two daily diary samples (N1 = 3,011 daily diary observations of 274 participants and N2 = 12,740 daily diary observations of 811 participants). Consistent with preregistered hypotheses, following nights of reported high-quality sleep, the link between current affect and global life satisfaction was attenuated (i.e., lower affect globalizing). Sleep-based interventions are broadly useful for improving psychological health and the current findings suggest another avenue by which such interventions may improve well-being: by providing crucial protection against the risks associated with affect globalizing.
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Notes
After collecting data from Sample A, we changed the response scales of all sleep quality, current affect, and life satisfaction items in Sample B. For all measures, we changed the lower anchor from 1 to 0. For the life satisfaction measure, we replaced the scale anchors of “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree” with “not at all” to “very strongly” descriptors. By equating the lowest point of the scale with an absolute value (i.e., “0 = not at all”), this revised scale enhances the interpretability of absolute mean level variables.
In line with prior work on affect globalizing (Willroth et al., 2020), we focused our hypotheses on life satisfaction. However, we also conducted planned exploratory analyses to test whether sleep quality and interval were associated with a weaker link between current affect and other types of well-being (i.e., sense of purpose, optimism, and romantic relationship satisfaction). Results for these other types of well-being are reported in Supplementary Online Materials.
The random effect of day was dropped from one model to achieve convergence.
The interaction between person-centered negative affect and person-centered sleep interval was statistically non-significant in both samples when excluding, rather than recoding, extreme sleep values.
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Research was funded by an Insight Grant awarded to B.Q.F. from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council.
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EW and BF developed the research questions and hypotheses. All authors contributed to the preregistration. AG and EW conducted the literature review. EW and ST conducted the analyses. EW wrote the first draft of the manuscript and all authors made substantive revisions.
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Willroth, E.C., Gatchpazian, A., Thai, S. et al. The Insulating Function of Sleep for Well-being: Daily Sleep Quality Attenuates the Link Between Current Affect and Global Life Satisfaction. Affec Sci 3, 318–329 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-021-00092-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42761-021-00092-4