Sleep Efficiency and Naturalistically-Observed Social Behavior Following Marital Separation: The Critical Role of Contact with an Ex-partner.

Marital disruption is associated with increased risk for a range of poor health outcomes, including disturbed sleep. This report examines trajectories of actigraphy-assessed sleep efficiency following marital separation as well as the extent to which daily social behaviors and individual differences in attachment explain variability in these trajectories over time. One hundred twenty-two recently-separated adults (N = 122) were followed longitudinally for three assessment periods over five months. To objectively assess daily social behaviors and sleep efficiency, participants wore the Electronically Activated Recorder (EAR) during the day (for one weekend at each assessment period) and an actiwatch at night (for seven days at each assessment period). Greater time spent with an ex-partner, as assessed by the EAR, was associated with decreased sleep efficiency between participants (p = .003). Higher attachment anxiety was also associated with decreased sleep efficiency (p = .03), as was the EAR-observed measure of "television on." The latter effect operated both between (p = .004) and within participants (p = .005). Finally, study timepoint moderated the association between EAR-observed measure of "television on" and sleep efficiency (p = .007). The current findings deepen our understanding of sleep disturbances following marital separation and point to contact with an ex-partner and time spent with the television on as behavioral markers of risk.

Yielding to social presence as a bioenergetic strategy.

All life must strategically conserve and allocate resources in order to meet the challenges of living. Social Baseline Theory suggests that, for humans, social context and the social resources therein are a central ecology in human phylogeny. In ontogeny, this manifests in flexible bioenergetic strategies that vary in the population based on social history. We introduce yielding, a conservation process wherein we relax physiological investment in response to a challenge when in the presence of a relational partner. The availability of these conserved resources then impact response to subsequent challenges while alone and if this pattern is habitual, it can reciprocally influence strategies used to solve or cope with typical stress. We discuss neural targets of this resource conservation and reframe our lab's previous studies on the social regulation of neural threat responding within this framework. We then show functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) data indicating the presence of relational partners decreases blood-oxygen-level-dependent (BOLD) response to threat in key targets of resource conservation (e.g, dlPFC, dACC, and insula) and that stronger signal reduction in these areas coincide with less BOLD in pre-frontal (vmPFC, dlPFC) and visuo-sensory integration (occipital cortex, precuneus, superior parietal lobule) regions during ostracism. Finally, we show that these neural relationships are associated with less use of self-regulation-based coping strategies two years post scanning. Taken together, we show the utility of yielding both as a concept and as a bioenergetic process which helps to conserve energy in this social primate.