Dynamic relation between physical activity and sleep in old age – the role of self-regulation, stress and dyadic factors
Final Report Abstract
My research stay aimed to extent my methodological knowledge, i.e., dyadic analysis of intensive longitudinal data and to study dyadic factors of health and health behavior among older couples. Older adults often live in long-term relationships, which mutually shape the lifes of the partners. During my research stay, I examined how partners’ behavior are related to each other using the conceptual model by Hoppmann and Gerstorf (2014) describing interrelations and dyadic factors among couples. For the first sub-project I focused on joined goals, defined as goals that both partners share and want to achieve together. We examined how joint goals are associated with goal progress, relationship-satisfaction, and health status (i.e. allostatic load). We could compare the participants’ self-reports if a goal is joint with an objective rating assessing if both partners independently from one another actually listed goals with the same content. We found the proposed association between joined goals and goal progress as well as better health, but only among those with little positive illusions, i.e. they accurately perceived if a goal is joined. For relationship-satisfaction, the more goals a persons shares with the partner and the more positive illusions the person has, the more satisfied he or she was with the relationship. The second sub-project focused on the dyadic relationship between sleep and affect in older couples. Little attention has been paid to the social context of sleep, although interrelations between spouses’ sleep have been documented. Using intensive longitudinal data from the same dataset, we examined associations between one’s own sleep quality and affective states (i.e. emotional state before going to bed and after waking up) of one’s spouse. Multi-level models show that within older adults, better daily sleep quality goes hand in hand with less negative affect and with more positive affect. Most important for our research question, sleep quality was found to wax and wane in association with the spouse. Currently I am working on a coordinated analyses trying to replicate these finding in a German partner study. This study points to the importance of moving beyond the individual and taking into account social others, such as spouses when trying to understand time-varying associations between sleep quality and affective states in older couples. In summary, the project points out the importance to move beyond the individual and include the partner when studying goals, health-behavior, or well-being in old age.
Publications
- (2021) Joint Goals in Older Couples: Associations With Goal Progress, Allostatic Load, and Relationship Satisfaction. Frontiers in psychology 12 623037
Ungar, Nadine; Michalowski, Victoria I.; Baehring, Stella; Pauly, Theresa; Gerstorf, Denis; Ashe, Maureen C.; Madden, Kenneth M.; Hoppmann, Christiane A.
(See online at https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.623037)
