Study Questions for Exam 2

Exam 2 will be on material from the Fredrickson reading on Sakai; the Hammack reading on Sakai, textbook chapters 5, 6, 7, and 9; and all of the lectures since Exam 1. Answering the questions below in a thorough and thoughtful way will help you to think through a lot of that material and check your understanding of it.

1. Review the lecture outline for sleep and dreams. What do you think are the two most important ideas in this topic? Why do you think they are most important?

The main ideas are: sleep stages, cognitive benefits, and dreams. The cognitive benefits are: improved attention, consolidated memory, increased insight, and increased creativity.

2. Sleep

a) Describe the sleep stages.

Awake: low-voltage, high frequency beta waves

Drowsy/Calm: alpha waves prominent

Stage 1: theta waves prominent, brief transitional stage of light sleep that usually lasts only about 10-12 minutes, muscular contractions occur during this stage.

Stage 2: sleep spindles and mixed EEG activity, brief bursts of higher frequency brain waves, respiration rate, heart rate, muscle tension, & body temperature begin to decline.

Stage 3 and 4: slow wave-sleep; progressively more delta waves (you reach this slow wave sleep in less than an hour and stay there for roughly a half-hour).

Stage 5, REM: low-voltage, high frequency brain waves, vivid dreaming, deep stage of sleep. Muscles become paralyzed. Brain Activity dominated by Beta Waves. Beta Waves are the awake processing thought and Problem solving Brain waves. Dreaming Occurs in REM sleep. REM occurs about 4 Times a Night. Intervals become longer throughout the Night.

Describe the sleep cycle. How does the sleep cycle change over the course of a full period of sleep?

During the course of a night, sleep cycle repeats about four times. Cycle gradually changes. The first REM period is relatively short, lasting only a few minutes. Later REM periods become longer, 40-60 minutes. NREM intervals tend to get shorter. Young adults typically spend about 15-20% of their sleep time in slow wave sleep and another 20-25% in REM sleep.

3. What would you say to people who say they never dream?

Everyone dreams during the REM stage of sleep, but sometimes it’s hard to remember those dreams.

4. How can you improve sleep without medication?

Pay attention to daytime habits (don’t nap, avoid nicotine, exercise earlier in the day, engage in regular physical activity), create a pre-sleep ritual (stop doing work at least 30 min prior to going to sleep), manage stress, reduce your sleep debt, and avoid accumulating sleep debt.

5. What are the effects of sleep deprivation?

Sleepiness, clumsiness, slow reaction time, impaired attention, memory, and decision making, difficulty with emotion regulation, triggers hormonal changes that increase hunger, impaired immune system, and increased inflammatory responses.

6. Describe three psychological approaches to explaining the cause and meaning of dreams. Discuss research evidence that is relevant to these approaches.

Sigmund Freud: wish fulfillment, people fulfill ungratified needs from waking hours through wishful thinking in dreams, as a result of unconscious attempts to censor and disguise the true meaning of their dreams, research has not provided much support for Freud’s view

Rosalind Cartwright: problem solving view, dreams provide an opportunity to work through everyday problems, continuity between waking and sleeping thought, dreams allow people to engage in creative thinking about problems because dreams are not restrained by logic or realism, recent research shows that REM sleep can enhance learning

J. Allan Hobson: activation-synthesis model, dreams are by-products of bursts of activity originating from subcortical areas in the brain, dreams are side effects of the neural activation that