The Role Of Sleep-related Attention Bias In Psychophysiological Insomnia And It’s Mechanism Research

In recent years, psychological researchers have found that many different kind of mentaldisorders exist an attentional bias for disorder-related stimuli.And the attention for disorder-relatedstimuli plays an important role in the maintenance of psychological disorders, and some even in acausal mechanism.Over the past few decades, many researchers have explored the attentional biasfor sleep-related stimuli in insomniac, most of which are phenomenological, descriptive studies,and some are done in the actual environment of sleep, recent studies have begun to doexperimental research on the computer.Most of these studies have found that insomnia exists anattentional bias for sleep-related stimuli. But few study had explore the role of sleep-relatedeattentional bias in precipitating or perpetuating insomnia, and we are also not sure about the reasonfor exsiting sleep-related attentional bias, for the findings are not consistent. If we know therelationship between sleep and sleep-related attentional bias,we can understand the formation,development process of insomnia, and it’s helpful to establish or verify the theory of insomnia, andit can provide instructions for the treatment of insomnia and helf people improve their sleepquality. In computerized experimental studies,both salient sttimuli and neutral sttimuli wereprensent on the screen to investigate any systematic processing differences between good sleepersand people with sleep disorder.The paradigm in these attentinal tasks does not depend on subjects’self-reports, and the results are more accurate. Therefore, the present study use computerizedexperiment to collect sleep-related attentional bias.Specifically, this study use dot-detection paradigm and induction change blindness paradigmto compare the difference of attention for sleep-related stimuli between good sleepers,moderatesleepers and poor sleeps, explore the role of sleep-related attentional bias in perpetuating insomniaor even precipitating insomnia, and explore the generation mechanism of sleep-related attentionalbias. The main results are as follows:(1) Psychophysiological insomnia existe an attentional bias for sleep-related stimuli.(2) With the decline of the quality of sleep, sleep problems increase, the individual’sattentional bias for insomnia stimuli increases. It improved sleep-related attentional bias plays rolesboth in precipitating and perpetuating insomnia.(3)The sleep-related attentional bias can be elicited by both “craving” and “threat”.