Sleep and related disorders

Sleep research in psychology examines how sleep duration, quality, and timing relate to cognition, mood, and physical health, drawing on epidemiological surveys, laboratory experiments, and clinical trials to understand both normal sleep and disorders like chronic insomnia. Disrupted sleep has been linked to elevated risks of cardiovascular disease, metabolic conditions, and psychiatric illness, making it one of the more consequential targets for behavioral intervention—cognitive behavioral therapy for insomnia, for instance, has become a first-line treatment with a growing body of meta-analytic support. Researchers are still working to clarify the direction of causality in many of these associations, and there is active debate over how best to measure sleep constructs reliably across diverse populations, including refining psychometric tools that can distinguish overlapping dimensions like sleep quality and sleep efficiency. Open questions remain around the role of circadian timing—not just how long people sleep, but when—and how individual differences in circadian biology moderate the health and cognitive consequences of insufficient or mistimed sleep.

Works

100,962

Total citations

1,943,351

Keywords

InsomniaSleep DurationCognitive Behavioral TherapySleep QualityMeta-AnalysisEpidemiology