Children’s avoidance and habituation towards threat following sleep restriction and increased sleepiness

Ewing, Donna L. and Broschart, Liliane and Burnand, Alice and Cartwright-Hatton, Sam (2025) Children’s avoidance and habituation towards threat following sleep restriction and increased sleepiness. [Data Collection]

URI: https://doi.org/10.17033/DATA.00000337

Project Description

This project aimed to explore the impact of a sleep restriction for children, and the associated increased sleepiness, on children's approach and avoidance behaviour during a behavioural approach task where they were asked to choose how close to stand to a threat stimulus. The task was repeated at two time points to allow the researchers to explore the impact of restricted sleep and sleepiness on fear avoidance and habituation. Children were assigned to one of three sleep restriction conditions: Sleep restricted at Time one only; Sleep restricted at Time two only, or typical sleep at both time points.

Uncontrolled Keywords:

Anxiety; fear; sleep restriction; sleepiness; avoidance; habituation

Subjects:

C Biological sciences > C800 Psychology
C Biological sciences > C821 Child psychology
C Biological sciences > C832 Quantitative psychology
C Biological sciences > C856 Experimental psychology
C Biological sciences > C857 Affective psychology

Departments:

School of Humanities and Social Science

Depositing User:

Donna Ewing

Date Deposited:

18 Nov 2025 14:17

Last Modified:

18 Nov 2025 14:17

Researchers (inc. External):

- Ewing, Donna L.
- D.Ewing@brighton.ac.uk
- https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8727-4914
- Broschart, Liliane
- L.Broschart@brighton.ac.uk
- Burnand, Alice
- aliceburnand@gmail.com
- Cartwright-Hatton, Sam
- s.cartwright-hatton@sussex.ac.uk

Additional details

Data collection method:

Schools were initially approached and invited to sign up to the study. Letters were sent out to parents of children in school years 3-5 informing them about the study and inviting them to return a consent form to sign their child up to the study. Once signed up, parents were informed about their child's sleep condition and given instructions for the child's sleep the night before each testing session. During testing, questionnaires were completed in small groups, with questions read aloud to the children who then completed their responses individually. Children later completed the behavioural approach task individually to ensure that they were not influenced by their peers. For this, children were informed that a balloon would be burst by the researcher (the threat stimulus), who indicated where they would stand while the balloon was burst. Children placed a marker on the floor for where they wanted to stand in relation to the threat stimulus. Distance from their marker to the threat stimulus was recorded and used as an index of their avoidance/approach. The task was repeated a week later, with children again requested to adhere to the sleep restriction protocol for their assigned group.

Grant number:

Internal grants: Rising Stars and Postgraduate Research Scheme

Resource language:

English

Metadata language:

English

Statement on legal, ethical and access issues:

Ethical approval was received from the Cross-Schools Research Ethics Committee. All participants were given a unique, anonymised ID number to protect their identities. Password-protected spreadsheets were used to link parent and child data, and this (and all data) was saved on the University's OneDrive, a secure and backed-up storage drive. Hardcopies of data are stored in a locked filing cabinet at the university. Risks of harm from the sleep restriction were minimised by imposing only a short sleep restriction (2 hours) on one occasion only. As such, this was no more of a sleep restriction than that of a special occasion where a child may stay up late. Size of balloons (and thus noise level of the pop) were standardised using a gauge to ensure that the level of noise was not excessive nor beyond that of the level of sound children may be naturally exposed to, such as during play. As child participants were used in this study, both parents and schools acted as gatekeepers, and parents were encouraged to discuss the study with their children prior to them taking part in the study. It was also made their to children that they did not have to take part if they didn't want to. The Research Assistants had enhanced DBS clearance to work with children.

Collection period:

From	To
September 2019	July 2025

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Full Dataset

Child sleep res ... hin 30mins).omv

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