Preferred Name
Sancho Sequeira
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 License.
Date of Graduation
Spring 2015
Document Type
Thesis
Degree Name
Master of Arts (MA)
Department
Department of Graduate Psychology
Advisor(s)
Jeff Dyche
Abstract
Alcohol is one of the most common psychoactive drugs, and has been used by humans for thousands of years. Research has focused on the effects of alcohol on sleep, however recent trends in the literature have taken a more bidirectional approach to the relationship between alcohol and sleep. This research investigates the effects of chronic, partial sleep deprivation on alcohol consumption. Twelve adolescent Sprague Dawley rats had free access to two bottles at all times, one containing water and one containing a 7% alcohol and water solution. Sleep deprivation was achieved by using a forced exercise wheel. All rats were sleep restricted for a small (18hrs), medium (20hrs), and large (22hrs) amount every day for 7 days, one week. Additionally, there was a wheel control (WC) condition. Each rat experienced every level of the sleep deprivation condition and one week of the wheel control condition for a total of 4 experimental weeks. There was a significant effect of sleep condition on voluntary alcohol consumption, F (4, 44) = 9.191, p < .001, partial η2 = .455. Post hoc testing using pairwise comparisons showed that the only group that was significantly different was the control group. Thus the WC condition also showed an increase in consumption, which does not allow us to conclude that there is a causal relationship between sleep deprivation and alcohol. Implications and future directions are discussed.
Recommended Citation
Sequeira, Sancho N., "Sleep deprivation and voluntary alcohol consumption in adolescent rats" (2015). Masters Theses, 2010-2019. 21.
https://commons.lib.jmu.edu/master201019/21
