Sleep, Mood, and Life Satisfaction: A Psychology Study
This paper presents a psychology research study investigating the influence of sleep attainment on mood, perceived adequacy of sleep, life satisfaction, and cognitive functioning among first-year university psychology students. Using the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) and a timed Reading Comprehension Test (RCT), researchers collected self-reported sleep data alongside standardized measures from 150 participants. The study hypothesizes that insufficient sleep leads to depressed affect, which in turn negatively colors self-reports of well-being and impairs cognitive task performance. The paper covers participant demographics, instrumentation, and data collection procedures, and concludes by calling for further inquiry into the relationships between sleep, mood, and broader life domains.
- Introduction and Study Purpose: Study aims and central hypothesis about sleep
- Participants: Demographics of 150 first-year psychology students
- Instrumentation and Measures: SWLS and Reading Comprehension Test described
- Data Collection Procedures: Survey and RCT administration process
- Findings and Conclusions: Sleep deprivation linked to negative self-report bias
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What makes this paper effective
- The paper clearly links its hypothesis to its measurement instruments, making the logic from question to method easy to follow.
- Ethical considerations — informed consent, anonymity, voluntary participation, and access to counseling — are explicitly addressed, demonstrating awareness of research standards.
- Demographic detail (mean age and standard deviation broken down by gender) is reported precisely, lending credibility to the participant description.
Key academic technique demonstrated
The paper demonstrates how to align a research hypothesis with validated instruments. By choosing the Satisfaction with Life Scale — a published, peer-reviewed measure — rather than an ad hoc questionnaire, the study anchors its subjective self-report data in an established psychometric tool. This is a foundational technique in empirical psychology: using validated scales to operationalize abstract constructs like "life satisfaction."
Structure breakdown
The paper follows a standard APA-style empirical structure: a brief introduction stating purpose and hypothesis, followed by a Method section divided into Participants, Instrumentation, and Procedures subsections. The Instrumentation subsection is the most detailed, reproducing the full SWLS items and explaining the RCT format. The paper closes with a short summary of findings and a call for future research. This is a compact but complete research report appropriate for an introductory undergraduate methods course.
Introduction and Study Purpose
The purpose of this study was to investigate the influence of mood on subjects' perceptions of the adequacy of their sleep, their reports of overall satisfaction and dissatisfaction with life, and the accuracy of their estimations of task performance. It was hypothesized that sleep attainment influences the ability to accurately judge the adequacy of one's sleep, cognitive functioning, and perceptions of satisfaction with life.
The findings suggest that a lack of sleep may result in depressed affect, which may cast a negative valence on self-reports. Research on sleep deprivation consistently points to its downstream effects on emotional regulation and subjective well-being. The study calls for additional inquiry into the relationship between sleep attainment, mood at the time of reporting and prior to the report, and other aspects of life — such as job satisfaction, interpersonal relationships, economic status, and general health.
Participants
The sample consisted of 150 first-year psychology students at a university. All subjects were fluent in English. Seventy-one percent of the sample was female and twenty-nine percent was male. Of the 106 female subjects, the mean age was 22.27 years (SD = 0.61). The mean age of the 44 male subjects was 23.18 years (SD = 0.90).
Instrumentation and Measures
When reporting the amount of sleep they attained, students were asked to estimate how many hours, on average, they slept on a typical night.
To measure subjects' perceptions of their satisfaction with life, the Satisfaction with Life Scale (SWLS) (Diener, Emmons, Larsen, & Griffin, 1985) was used. The scale contains five items to which subjects were asked to reply as honestly as they could, indicating their agreement or disagreement with each statement using a 7-point scale. The scale points were as follows: 1 = Strongly Disagree; 2 = Disagree; 3 = Slightly Disagree; 4 = Neither Agree nor Disagree; 5 = Slightly Agree; 6 = Agree; and 7 = Strongly Agree.
The five items to which subjects responded were:
1. In most ways my life is close to my ideal.
2. The conditions of my life are excellent.
3. I am satisfied with life.
4. So far I have gotten the important things I want in life.
5. If I could live my life over, I would change almost nothing.
To assess cognitive functioning, subjects were asked to complete the Reading Comprehension Test (RCT). The RCT is a timed paper-and-pencil test that uses a total of 47 items to measure cognitive functioning. To complete the test, subjects read excerpts from articles, stories, and textbooks. Immediately following each excerpt, subjects responded to several multiple-choice questions pertaining to that excerpt. Research on cognitive effects of sleep deprivation suggests that reduced sleep impairs reading comprehension and related tasks, making the RCT an appropriate instrument for this study.
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