LAUSR

While poor sleep quality has been tied to worse social functioning, this relationship is complex and other variables likely play a role. For instance, emotion regulation and alexithymia are both related to sleep quality and to social functioning. Yet, the impact of these emotional processes on the relationship between sleep and social functioning remains unexplored. This study aimed to fill this gap by assessing whether alexithymia or two emotion regulation strategies –reappraisal and suppression—moderate the relationship between sleep and one aspect of social functioning (participation in social activities). We hypothesized that the relationship between sleep and social participation would be stronger for those who had greater difficulties in these emotional processes (high alexithymia, high suppression, or low reappraisal). Data for this study came from the Pittsburgh Cold Study 3, a publicly available dataset (N = 213). Participants completed measures of self-reported sleep, emotion regulation, alexithymia, and social participation. Objective sleep data was also collected via actigraphy. The Reappraisal subscale significantly moderated the relationship between sleep quality and social participation. For participants with high reappraisal scores, worse sleep quality was related to lower social participation scores. Additionally, the Suppression subscale significantly moderated the relationship between actigraphy sleep duration and social participation. For participants with lower suppression scores, greater sleep duration was related to higher social participation. Alexithymia did not significantly moderate these relationships. Our results suggest that the ability to effectively regulate one’s emotions may be important to consider in the link between sleep and social participation, as the relationship varies depending upon one’s use of emotion regulation strategies. Importantly, this sample included only individuals who had no recent mental health treatment. Future work should extend these findings by including a wider range of participants, including those with relevant diagnoses– such as borderline personality and schizophrenia-spectrum disorders. The data were collected by the Laboratory for the Study of Stress, Immunity, and Disease at the Carnegie Mellon University under the directorship of Sheldon Cohen, PhD; and were accessed via the Common Cold Project website (www.commoncoldproject.com; grant number NCCIH AT006694).