Sleep Lab.
Dept. of Psychology - University of Florence
Via, Firenze, Italy
This paper will discuss
the relationship between yawning, sleep onset
and awakening from sleep, and
sleepiness.Proximity to sleep, before and after,
will be examined in several conditions and
populations. Also the time course of yawning and
sleepiness assessed by subjective estimates will
be confronted. Finally the induced (contagious)
yawning will be confronted with the temporal
trend of the spontaneous one.
Piero
Salzarulo
The relationship between
yawning, sleep and sleepiness seems evident both
from a physiological and a behavioural
perspective.
The relationship between
yawning, sleep proximity and sleepiness is
steady before sleep onset, but not after sleep.
Whereas the increase of yawning frequency before
sleep onset has been found both in two sleep
typologies and in the elderly, the frequency and
the yawning time course at the awakening is
different as a function of sleep typology and
age.
Further experimental
studies are necessary. For example, it could be
useful to evaluate yawning frequency and time
after experimentally induced changes of sleep
time and amount (sleep partial restriction or
total deprivation), and to use a fine grained
analysis of the time course of both yawning
occurrence and sleepiness to ascertain if
yawning can be considered a behavioural
expression of the sleep pressure.
