How can sensory deprivation affect communication

The results showed reduced feelings of loneliness in participants. Another study using augmented reality to enable communication between two people found that participants reported a higher sense of social presence. A third study found that people are as likely to engage in conversation with a humanoid robot as they are with a person.

The reasons for these results have to do with interpersonal connectivity. A study of young adults ages 19 to 32 found that individuals with higher social media usage are more than three times as likely to feel socially isolated, compared with those who use social media less frequently.

Social media especially affects girls because their social life and status often revolve around intimacy and inclusion.

Research has also shown that decreasing time spent on social media can help reduce feelings of loneliness among young adults ages 18 to Psychiatric mental health nurse practitioners PMHNPs and mental health professionals can promote healthy practices for using technology and social media to address the widespread problem of loneliness and social isolation.

One way people can stave off the effects of social isolation and loneliness is to use virtual platforms like Zoom and Skype. Another strategy is to control your social media intake by having a clear purpose for logging on or scheduling a time to browse. Additionally, individuals can minimize distractions, such as by unfollowing people that post negative content or disabling push notifications.

You can also use platforms for good by sharing inspiring stories that have a positive influence on your emotional well-being. Finally, it can be a good idea to evaluate the effect of social media and technology on your mental health.

One way PMHNPs can help socially isolated people is to identify and address potential barriers to communication, like sensory impairments. They can also identify patients at risk of loneliness and assess for comorbidities.

Additionally, PMHNPs can collaborate with other medical professionals to provide targeted social support. PMHNPs can also prioritize lonely patients for virtual visits. Finally, they can offer telehealth counseling to improve surveillance and mitigation of major complications of unaddressed loneliness.

While using technology to address loneliness and social isolation has advantages and disadvantages, forming healthy technology usage habits and seeking guidance from mental health professionals can help individuals improve their emotional and mental well-being.

If a person is not able to experience the necessary level of social contact and behaviour, they can experience social isolation. Loneliness, in turn, has been linked to higher levels of stress. The primary function of the human stress response is to protect the body from the environment. When a person is socially isolated, as it is a basic human need, the body will perceive the situation as a threat.

During the time of the active stress response, the brain will release multiple stress hormones to protect the body from danger.

The release of these hormones is needed for the person to react towards the current stress factor, and resist the possible harm. However, the body cannot release these stress hormones and protect the body from stressful situations for unlimited time.

Having an active stress response over an extended period has been proven to increase the risk of developing cardiovascular disease, elevated blood pressure, infectious illness, cognitive deterioration, and mortality. These are physiological consequences of being prone to stress over time, and they are typically experienced in adulthood.

As argued, socially isolated children are at increased risk of health problems in adulthood. Early on in their development, the mice and monkeys were socially isolated for several weeks to further investigate the relationship between social isolation and physiological and cognitive functioning.

The researchers found deficits in the communication chains in a type of cell called oligodendrocytes. In other words, these cells had impaired neuron-to-neuron cell-to-cell communication in the prefrontal cortex. However, there is a dearth of relevant research in actual interpersonal situations.

Further complicating this area is the difficulty of quantifying communication success. One study reported that following a night-shift, doctors showed a small number of specific conversational changes, such as being less likely to ask for clarification when conducting interpersonal interviews However, conclusions about the effect of sleep loss are confounded by the effects of longer working hours and increased work demand.

Experimental research is necessary to account for such confounds. In this study, we primarily aimed to determine whether sleep deprivation affects the ability to communicate efficiently during a dyadic interaction. We used two distinct collaborative tasks to capture broad changes in the ability to provide and understand verbal information. Since these tasks are assumed to rely on verbal communication, we hypothesised that the impact of sleep deprivation would lead to a decrease in task performance.

Using the same large sample, we also aimed to replicate the effects of sleep loss on individual verbal fluency seen in previous studies. Descriptive statistics can be found in Table 1 for individual measurements and in Table 2 for dyadic task performance. The mixed condition combinations in the word-description task are related to specific rounds due to alternation of roles rather than separate dyads.

Neither of the verbal fluency tasks revealed any differences in words produced or number of errors between the sleep-deprived and control groups see Table 3. Non-informative default priors were used on the number of errors since we had no data to base this on.

Using overall score number of bricks correctly placed as the predicted variable, the data suggest that sleep deprivation lead to changes in performance for both the builder and describer roles. The median estimate shows that sleep deprivation in builders caused a decrease of 1.

On the other hand, sleep deprivation in the describer was associated with an increase of 0. Sleep deprivation in either role did not predict time taken to complete the task; however, sleep deprivation in builders was found to decrease task efficiency, with fewer points per second.

For describers, this effect was not distinguishable from zero. The full results for this task can be seen in Table 4. Bayesian regression estimating the effect of sleep deprivation on model-building performance.

A cumulative distribution was used for the score response outcome, while a Gaussian distribution was used for time and efficiency outcomes. Sleep deprivation did not predict a change in score per round for either guesser or speaker performance see Table 5. Bayesian multilevel regression estimating the effect of sleep deprivation on word-description performance. The response distribution was set to cumulative since model fit comparisons revealed that this was the best fit for the data.

No difference was found between the sleep-deprived and control groups in speaking duration, average speaking volume, or speaking volume consistency see Table 6. Non-informative default priors were used on speech volume and speech volume consistency, since no studies have been published that reported raw values. In this study, we investigated the impact of a single night of total sleep deprivation on the ability to communicate. Using individual verbal fluency tasks, no noticeable difference was found between those who were sleep deprived and those who had slept sufficiently.

This sets our results apart from some previous studies that have shown verbal fluency to be impaired following sleep deprivation 10 , Indeed, for the FAS task, the majority of the posterior distribution is greater than zero, suggesting that if anything, sleep deprivation is more likely to have a beneficial effect on verbal fluency.

This corresponds with one previous study 14 , reporting an improvement in verbal fluency following sleep deprivation. Our study differs from most studies in that participants were only measured at one timepoint, while others have used repeated measures. Additionally, task duration varies between previous studies, which may explain the differences in result.

However, the convergence of evidence between this study and the largest other study conducted 13 , suggests that the effect of sleep deprivation on verbal fluency is less robust than earlier findings indicated. Performance on the model-building task was affected by sleep deprivation. If the builder was sleep deprived, overall performance of the dyad was lower.

This follows previous research suggesting that verbal perception and linguistic comprehension are decreased after sleep loss 15 — We also found that task efficiency the number of bricks correctly placed per second was lower if the builder was sleep deprived. Since builder sleep deprivation did not predict time taken to complete the task, the change in efficiency for builders can be assumed to be driven by the change in information-flow rate rather than a change in time-on-task.

The improvement in model-building score if the describer was sleep deprived was unexpected. A speculative explanation is that since sleep deprivation may increase reactivity to psychosocial stressors 23 though evidence is inconsistent 24 , and stress can facilitate cognitive processes such as allocentric spatial processing 25 , such an increase in stress levels could have been beneficial for performance in this role.

Alternatively, aspects of speech prosody not measured could have made understanding the instructions easier. For example, though our data shows no change in total speaking duration after sleep deprivation, it is possible that participants spoke fewer words while at the same time speaking more slowly. This could conceivably boost intelligibility by information becoming more direct and easier to understand. Sleep deprivation did not have a noticeable effect on performance on the word-description task, nor was there any evidence of either additive or interaction effects.

Compared to the model-building task, the word-description task allows for full attention to be directed at the speaker, rather than being split between the speaker and the building bricks. This may explain the different outcomes, as sleep-deprived people have impaired attentional abilities 8. Furthermore, the brevity of the word-description task may make it less susceptible to failures in attention. Sleep deprivation did not predict the overall amount of speech, speech volume, or speech volume consistency during the dyad interactions.

This suggests that although previous laboratory observations have found altered speech after sleep loss 19 , 20 , speech contribution in actual interpersonal situations may not be impacted. However, the posterior distribution is generally too wide to exclude the possibility of small effects and there may be other aspects of prosody that are affected by sleep loss, such as intonation There are a number of limitations to this study and potential directions for future research.

The tasks were generally short in duration, and given that one of the strongest impairments following sleep loss is in sustained attention 8 , communicative tasks that require concentration over longer periods of time may be increasingly impacted. A further limitation is that the interactions were between two unacquainted individuals. Interactions with strangers have greater novelty and are potentially more physiologically arousing than with known individuals 26 , possibly overriding the effects of sleep loss.

Additionally, while Sociometric Badges or similar devices hold promise as a research tool, the pre-processing of the audio and the proprietary algorithms that control the output mean that it was not possible to analyse the raw audio signal, which may have led to more comprehensive insights about changes in speech prosody after sleep deprivation. More broadly, it is difficult to quantify communication ability, since the definition of performance depends heavily on the situation.

In this study, we have aimed to address this issue by investigating the effect on sleep deprivation on communication in different ways, specifically using the performance on three verbal tasks as a marker for communicative ability. Future research would benefit from more closely investigating the mechanisms behind the changes seen in the model-building task, as well as the generalisability of performance impairments to other collaborative situations.

Overall, we find that sleep-deprived participants were less efficient and less accurate when acting on instructions to build an abstract model. Conversely, when a sleep-deprived person gave instructions, performance was improved. These effects were found despite a lack of effect of sleep deprivation on word-description, verbal fluency, speech duration, or speech volume.

Since many occupations rely on the ability to quickly understand and act on instructions, it is important for future studies to clarify the mechanisms behind these changes. An impairment in successfully following instructions could have important implications for a wide range of work environments such as on-call medical staff or air transport, where sleep loss is common.

A complete list of exclusion criteria can be found in the supplementary materials. Due to participant dropout, two of the participants were short-notice replacements. Though the sleep of these two participants was not measured as in other participants, they both verbally reported sleeping sufficiently and were analysed as control normal sleep participants in the collaborative tasks see Tables S1 and S2 for results with these two dyads removed.

The final sample was 92 control and 91 sleep-deprived participants. Participants were compensated for taking part SEK for sleep deprived participants, SEK for control participants. Proper nouns or the same words with different endings e. The outcome was the total amount of words produced, excluding words that broke the above rules.

A greater total score represents better verbal fluency. We also investigated the total amount of errors words that broke the above rules. A two-person model-building task was used to assess verbal communication 29 , Participants sat at opposite ends of a small table and the describer was instructed to turn their chair around degrees so that participants were not sitting face-to-face see Fig. The describer was then given an abstractly shaped model built from plastic interlocking building bricks and asked to instruct their partner to build an identical model, using verbal instructions only.

The builder could not see the model nor the face of the describer. The model was the same for each pair and consisted of 9 bricks of different colours see Fig.

The builder was provided with 30 bricks of varying shapes and colours, and it was not possible to identify a brick with a single feature e. The task provides flexibility for the participants to solve the problem in their own way, while allowing quantification of success in terms of the number of pieces correctly placed. A representative illustration of the seating arrangement during the two collaborative tasks. Note that Sociometric Badges not shown were additionally worn during all collaborative tasks.

Each word-prompt card contained the target word, plus an additional five related words that were prohibited. Participants sat face-to-face across a table, while keeping the word cards hidden from each other see Fig. There were 40 different word cards and the order was randomised for each pair.