The Role of Sleep in Adolescents’ Daily Stress Recovery: Negative Affect Spillover and Positive Affect Bounce-Back Effects

Although there is much research on sleep and emotion, few studies have examined the role of sleep as a potentially important context for stress recovery from one day to the next. Such daily processes might also be particularly important to adolescents, an age-group notorious for its lack of sufficient sleep. Eighty-nine adolescents recorded their emotions and stress for two-weeks through daily surveys. Sleep was monitored with Fitbit devices. Results show that objectively measured sleep (total sleep time, latency to sleep onset, and accumulated sleep debt) moderated affective responses to previous-day stress, suggesting that sleep quantity could have an impact on overnight stress recovery. Moreover, we found that sleep variables not only moderated cross-day negative affect spillover effects but cross-day positive affect bounce-back effects. Specifically, with more sleep, adolescents’ morning positive affect on days following high stress tended to “bounce-back” to the levels that were common following low stress days. Sleep seemed to help them recover from the emotional effects of the stressor. In contrast, if sleep was short following high stress days, adolescent positive affect remained low on the following morning. We did not find evidence that subjective sleep quality moderated spillover/ bounce-back effects. This research highlighted the importance of considering sleep and stress as daily processes to fully understand both daily contextual factors of stress recovery and the dynamic cross-day relationships between stress, sleep, and affect.