As humans grow from infancy to old age there are major changes in the amount and kind of sleep experienced. Babies sleep a lot more than children (spending from 16 to 20 hours asleep each day) and adults also have different sleep patterns and different stages of sleep. They tend to sleep about 16 hours a day. But their sleep is not continuous. By the age of six months a circadian rhythm has become recognized.
Between 16 and 35 years and between 35 and 50 years During infancy babies sleep more than everyone else and have different sleep patterns. They tend to sleep for around 16 hours a day but it is not continuous. They wake every hour due to a shorter sleep wake cycle than adults and their sleep stages consist of quiet sleep and active sleep: these are immature versions of SWS and REM sleep. By the time they have reached 6 months, a sleep-wake cycle is established with 1 or 2 naps during the day and as a result periods of sleep then lengthen. By the age of 5 children have an EEG pattern which is similar and looks like those of an adult but they are still sleeping more than adults with an approximate time of 12 hours in sleep and they also have more increase with approximately 30% of the total sleep time being in REM.
Describe and evaluate lifespan changes in sleep? (24 marks) As humans grow from infancy to old age there are major changes in the amount and kind of sleep experienced. Babies tend to sleep a lot more than adults roughly around 16 hours a day. They usually wake up every hour or so their sleep cycle is not 90 minutes. Infants have sleep stages similar to adults called quiet and active sleep; these are immature versions of SWS and REM sleep.
The immune system consists of various protein molecules which are regenerated during cell growth and protein synthesis in SWS. REM sleep initiates brain repair. Infants have a greater proportion of REM sleep than adults, which suggests that REM sleep may be important to brain growth. Siegal suggests that the amount of REM sleep in any animal is proportional to the immaturity of the offspring at birth. For example platypus is immature at birth and has about 8 hours REM sleep, whereas dolphin which can swim from birth has almost no REM sleep, suggesting a
Explore some of the issues that may be associated with the practise of co-sleeping. After birth newborns sleep anywhere between 11 to 21 hours a day varying form infant to infant (Michalesson, et al., as cited in Hoffnung et al., 2010). This can affect not only the new born child but also the main care giver and/or other family members who are living with the infant. This can lead to the practise of co-sleeping. Co-sleeping is where a newborn sleeps in the same bed as a family member or main caregiver.
Stage 3 and 4 also known as slow wave sleep (SWS) is characterised by delta brain waves, during these stages most of the body’s repair work is undertaken. In REM sleep there is fast, desynchronised EEG resembling the awake brain and the body is paralysed (cataplexy). Dement and Kleitman’s (1957) carried out a lab study with 9 participants and showed that when patients were woken during REM sleep they were far more likely to report dreaming. As the night progresses SWS gets shorter and REM sleep longer. Dement and Kleitman can be criticised for their very small sample size as it is unlikely to represent the range of individual differences in sleeping and dreaming.
State of Consciousness: Sleep Deprivation Circadian rhythm is a regular biological rhythm with a period of approximately 24 hours and is fundamental adaptation. Circadian rhythm is associated with sleep deprivation because of many different factors. When circadian rhythms are disturbed it throws off our biological clocks and hormones, body temperatures, and digestive cycles. When you lose at least an hour of sleep every night, week after week and month after month it makes it more difficult for a person to pay attention and to remember things. It also causes the reaction time to slow down, sometimes behavior becomes unpredictable, ability to make decisions decline.
Dement deprived volunteers of either NREM or REM sleep. He found that the participants deprived of REM sleep became much more aggressive and had very poor concentration skills. The results of NREM sleep were much less dramatic. By night 7 they attempted to enter into REM sleep 26 times compared to 12 times on the first night. This shows how desperate the participants that were deprived of REM need to have REM sleep.
Bowlby suggested that day-care is bad for emotional attachment and development of the child. Belsky and Rovine (88) found that if a child is in day-care for more than 4 months in the first year of life, they are more likely to become insecurely attached. Vandell and Corasaniti (90) found out that 8 year olds that had spent time in day-care in early life were less co-operative in school and with adults. Belsky (99) found that day-care in the first 5 years of life can lead to more aggressive behaviour in later life, this is backed up by the research carried out by Haskins (85) in which he found children that spent more time in large groups were more aggressive than children that
Sudden Infant Death Syndrome Sudden Infant Death Syndrome (SIDS) is the leading cause of death in infancy beyond the neonatal period. Current guidelines51 cite evidence that the risk of SIDS is reduced when infants sleep on their backs and in their parents’ room, but not in their parents’ bed. (For more information on this topic, see the Promoting Child Development theme.) Pacifiers have been linked with a lower risk of SIDS. It is recommended that infants be put to sleep with a pacifier, beginning at 1 month of age.