What are the impacts of emotions on adolescents' sleep duration and short-term memory performance, and how does sleep mediate this relationship

Abstract

This study focuses on how positive, negative, and neutral emotions influence adolescents’ sleep duration and short-term memory performance, and also tries to figure out whether sleep duration plays a mediating role in this process. This research carried out a mixed independent‑measures experiment with eight valid Chinese participants aged between 10 and 19. In the experiment, the researcher used video clips and music to induce different emotional states, recorded sleep time through sleep‑tracking devices, and measured short-term memory ability with a four‑digit number string recall test. The results showed that emotional states had a significant effect on sleep duration: teenagers in the negative emotion group slept the longest on average, while those in the positive emotion group slept the shortest. Although negative emotions tended to slightly lower memory accuracy and positive emotions improved it to a small degree, the overall effect of emotions on shortterm memory was not statistically significant. Meanwhile, Pearson correlation analysis showed almost no linear relationship between sleep duration and post‑sleep shortterm memory performance, which suggests that sleep duration does not mediate the link between emotions and short-term memory. These findings enrich the research on the interaction mechanism among emotion, sleep, and cognition in adolescents, and provide practical implications for improving adolescents’ daily sleep management and supporting their cognitive health development.