Nudging resilience: promoting sleep awareness to mental well-being among adults aged 60+

Salvi, Serena (2023) Nudging resilience: promoting sleep awareness to mental well-being among adults aged 60+. Doctoral thesis, Northumbria University.

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Abstract

Renewed awareness towards self-directed age stereotyping in older adults has given rise to research on the potential role of attitudes towards ageing on older adults' health and functioning. These studies have shown how a negative internalisation of ageist stereotypes would discourage older adults from seeking medical advice and be associated with negative subjective health evaluations. An essential dimension of mental health that is often affected in older adults is represented by sleep quality. Self-reported sleep quality among older adults is often unreliable compared to objective sleep measures. Investigations focused on self-reported sleep quality among older adults have suggested how this portion of the population would tend to accept disrupted sleep if believed to be up to standard for their age.

On the other hand, dysfunctional beliefs towards sleep in ageing might prompt older adults to report sleep disruption even without objective disrupted sleep. This thesis examines the potential impact of a behavioural intervention adopting behavioural nudges on older adults' dysfunctional sleep-related cognition. The first study examined a possible association between personal attitudes towards ageing, sleep locus of control and dysfunctional beliefs towards sleep. Furthermore, a behavioural nudge intervention has been conducted to assess how nudging self-stereotyping among adults aged 60+ can influence beliefs towards sleep in ageing and evaluate subjective sleep quality. Overall results highlighted that negative attitudes towards ageing were associated with dysfunctional beliefs about sleep. In contrast, positive attitudes correlated with more positive sleep perceptions like internal sleep locus of control. Additionally, attitudes towards ageing affected how participants assessed sleep quality. In Study 2, the implementation of nudge-based interventions using age stereotypes did not significantly impact dysfunctional beliefs or perceptions of sleep quality. However, age stereotypes did influence participants' perceptions of chronological age in others and their assessment of sleep scenario severity in standardised sleep vignettes.

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