That is a woefully low sample size...
Video games and sleep loss
11–20 of 34 posts
Re: Video games and sleep loss
#12My next question is, how well does this compare to watching television before going to bed. Research shows that to be detrimental to sleep quality as well. I'd almost like to see a study with participants watching a screen of light before sleeping and measuring the quality of their sleep...
Re: Video games and sleep loss
#13For me video games greatly affect my sleep. I was a teenager when I realized this and that was when I stopped playing games at around 9pm so my brain could reset and do something more relaxing. I don't think this is exclusive to games. I often have the same problem going to bed straight after coding. I still have things on the mind. I find the hardest game to sleep after is Starcraft. All that multitasking and thinki…
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Re: Video games and sleep loss
#14The article lacks details over what type of experience the player had when playing, slightly rendering any conclusions useless until further studies. Playing a computer game can be a spectrum of experiences, some that are very distant related to each other. For example, is the game that the person playing a single player game or multiplayer? strategy or action? The excitement level of doing some EVE trading a few hou…
They say violent so one assumes by violent they mean a violent action game. But what you says stands.
To add a general comment, no shit Sherlock, I just finished playing 2 hours of Planetside 2 and my adrenalin is sky high. I am going to need at least an hour of reading before bed.
Re: Video games and sleep loss
#15Wow, that's ground-breaking research. Doing something that maintains your brain more active for a longer time before sleeping makes your sleep worse. Nobel prize level at least.
I thought that the study would look at long-term effects of video games, at least.
Re: Video games and sleep loss
#16Idiots at work here. Subjective questionairres are always a total waste of time. They should have given participants a performance test of some kind. I will wager the gamers would perform as good or better than the non-gamers.
Re: Video games and sleep loss
#17That seems like a rather small sample size, both in number of people involved and the fact that it the results seem to be based on only a couple of points. (what's the variation in the sleep patterns normally? What about other factors that may affect their sleeping patterns? e.g. previous nights' sleep, exposure to other media content while not at the sleep lab, etc.) I'm genuinely interested. I do understand that th…
It was an experiment – not exactly a classic design – but still an experiment. In that context 17 participants are not ideal, but workable and typical. As you can imagine, getting people to sleep in a lab for two nights is hard and costs money that often isn’t there.
I wanted to read the actual paper to give some more detailed insight, but the website of the right database is currently down for maintenance. From their abstract I can see that from the outset they excluded everyone with existing sleeping difficulties. That implies that during recruitment and before the experiment started they already asked questions about sleeping patterns (to exclude outliers from the experiment).
I’m willing to bet that they also controlled for other variables, just like you mentioned, for example other media exposure or the previous nights’ sleep. That’s what you usually do.
(While searching for the paper I actually found some other papers about video gaming before sleeping. It seems like quite some found broadly similar results to this one, so in that context the result doesn’t seem super surprising. But note: This was just me browsing around and glancing at a few abstracts, by no means a thorough or even somewhat acceptable literature review.)
Re: Video games and sleep loss
#18Wow, that's ground-breaking research. Doing something that maintains your brain more active for a longer time before sleeping makes your sleep worse. Nobel prize level at least. I thought that the study would look at long-term effects of video games, at least.
Do you want to pay for such a study? I’m sure that many psychology or sociology departments would happily take your money.
But even with money, studying long term effects of media use is fiendishly difficult. Most studies looking at the impact of media use focus on short term effects, because that’s in many cases the only pragmatic solution.
For studying long term effects, experiments pretty much fall flat. You cannot control the media exposure of people for weeks and months. Even this experiment (probably) didn’t stop participants from using other media before they came to the lab, so control over media exposure was limited to the 2.5h or 50m.
So you have to rely on surveys and do a panel study (i.e. ask the same people the same questions at different points in time) – and that’s just messy. The randomization can no longer do all the work for you and you have to control for all variables that could plausibly also influence participants behavior, independent of media exposure. Expect mostly suggestions and never really solid results from that.
Re: Video games and sleep loss
#19look, The conlusion here is ridiculous.
When playing a violent video game, you will see a rise in adrenaline. I'd be willing to bet that if you participate in any adrenaline-heightened activity for 2.5 hours and then go right to bed, you'll see sleep loss.
"Video games and sleep loss" what a crock.
Re: Video games and sleep loss
#20Idiots at work here. Subjective questionairres are always a total waste of time. They should have given participants a performance test of some kind. I will wager the gamers would perform as good or better than the non-gamers.
They did take objective measures, via polysomnography. It's one of the novel aspects of this study. Interesting that perceived difficulty getting to sleep after gaming was greater than that recorded via the polysomnography.