Life Stress Measures and Reported Frequency of Sleep Disorders

Scales to assess nightmare recall frequency and recalled frequency of insomnia-related disorders (sleep onset, sleep-maintenance problems, unrefreshing sleep, and restless sleep) were administered, together with the Social Readjustment Rating Scale of Holmes and Rahe to 170 part-time undergraduate students (mean age 27.4 yr., 97 men, 73 women), and together with the Life Events Inventory of Tennant and Andrews to another sample of 91 part-time undergraduates (mean age 26 yr., 53 men, 37 women). The time span for which life events and sleep disorders were to be assessed was the previous 6 mo. Pearson rs suggested that the relationships of different types of scores for life events (scores for change, for distress, for amount of control over events, weighted and unweighted scores for negative and positive events) to reports of sleep disorders were mostly weak (the largest coefficient was .29) and nonsignificant. Of all life events measures, negative life events listed on the Readjustment Scale were the most closely associated with reports of sleep disorders; all 14 coefficients involving negative events were significant and in the clinically expected direction. Further research is needed to examine whether the size of correlations between events and sleep disorders is related to factors such as readiness to recall and report negative personal experiences.