Bedtime Stress Increases Sleep Latency and Impairs Next-Day Prospective Memory Performance

Goldberg, Zoë-lee; Thomas, Kevin G. F.; Lipinska, Gosia · 2020 · OpenAlex-citations

DOI: 10.3389/fnins.2020.00756

archive: archived pipeline: cataloged verified

Get this paper ↗ (DOI — opens at the source; we link to it, we don't host it)

Summary

This study investigates whether bedtime stress, a common everyday experience, disrupts sleep quality and subsequently impairs next-day prospective memory (PM) performance. While previous research established that healthy sleep enhances PM, those findings often relied on ecologically unnatural manipulations like total sleep deprivation. Additionally, literature on the direct effects of stress on PM has been inconsistent, largely because prior studies did not account for the intervening sleep period or the timing of stress exposure relative to intention encoding. The authors hypothesized that acute stress experienced immediately before bedtime would increase presleep arousal, disrupt sleep architecture, and thereby impair the execution of delayed intentions the following morning. The researchers conducted an experimental study with 40 young adults randomly assigned to either a stress or non-stress control condition. Participants first received instructions for a PM task, which required them to press a specific key when the word “president” appeared during a general knowledge questionnaire. Immediately after encoding this intention, participants underwent a manipulation: the stress group completed a modified Fear Factor Stress Test involving mortality salience writing, speech delivery, difficult mental arithmetic, and cold water immersion, while the control group performed neutral equivalents. Following the manipulation, participants underwent polysomnographic monitoring for a full night of sleep, with salivary cortisol, heart rate, and skin conductance measured at baseline, post-manipulation, during slow-wave sleep, and upon waking. The next morning, participants completed the PM task. Results confirmed that the stress manipulation successfully induced a significant physiological and subjective stress response compared to the control group. Participants in the stress condition exhibited significantly longer sleep latencies, reduced sleep depth, and altered non-rapid eye movement sleep percentages. Consequently, the stress group demonstrated significantly slower reaction times on the PM task the following morning, although accuracy differences were not statistically significant. Crucially, a general linear model revealed that the interaction between experimental condition and sleep latency significantly predicted PM reaction time. Specifically, within the stress group, longer sleep latencies were positively correlated with slower PM responses, whereas this relationship was absent in the non-stress group. The findings indicate that bedtime stress impairs next-day prospective memory performance indirectly by disrupting sleep processes, particularly by increasing the time required to fall asleep. This suggests that presleep arousal caused by stress interferes with the consolidation or retrieval mechanisms necessary for efficient PM execution. The study resolves inconsistencies in prior literature by demonstrating that the negative impact of stress on PM is mediated by sleep disruption rather than acute stress effects during task performance. These results highlight the importance of sleep quality in cognitive functioning and suggest that managing bedtime stress is critical for maintaining optimal prospective memory capabilities in daily life.

Provenance

The full processing record for this entry. Every stage of this paper's journey through the pipeline is logged — what ran, with which tool and model, how many attempts it took, and when it last completed.

Summary generated by qwen3.6-27b-prismaquant on 2026-06-25; verification: verified.

Topics

Ranked by relevance to this paper. Hover a topic for its definition.

• prospective memory interruptions