Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8280-2071

Date Available

6-17-2020

Year of Publication

2020

Degree Name

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Document Type

Doctoral Dissertation

College

Arts and Sciences

Department/School/Program

Psychology

First Advisor

Dr. Peggy S. Keller

Abstract

The amount of time someone spends co-sleeping with their partner, known as sleep concordance, has implications for sleep quality in couples. Attachment security has emerged as an important moderator of the association between sleep concordance and subjective sleep quality (Elsey et al., 2019). The current study tested whether cognitive pre-sleep arousal explains this pattern of moderation. Prior research suggests that these associations between sleep concordance, attachment security, and subjective sleep quality may be stronger for women than men, therefore gender differences in associations were also examined. Participants were 204 (68% female) individuals in an exclusive relationship lasting at least 3 months, recruited through Amazon’s Mechanical Turk. Data were analyzed with path analysis using structural equation modeling. Results suggest that women and men may have different needs at bedtime based on attachment security. Specifically, for women with lower attachment anxiety, sleep concordance was associated with greater subjective sleep quality, partly due to lower cognitive pre-sleep arousal. For men, attachment avoidance was associated with greater cognitive pre-sleep arousal and in turn, poorer subjective sleep quality. Results also indicated that depression and greater evening chronotype predicted greater cognitive pre-sleep arousal and thus poorer subjective sleep quality for women. For both men and women, anxiety was associated with decreased subjective sleep quality, in part due to greater cognitive pre-sleep arousal.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.13023/etd.2020.292

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