Introduction: The growing ubiquity of smartphones with around-the-clock access to social media has sparked concerns regarding their impacts on sleep, mental health, and cognition, particularly among young people. A rapid research response is crucial given the potential, yet still unclear, threats, and evidence-based solutions are needed to educate young people on how to use smartphones as part of a healthy lifestyle. Methods: We assessed the feasibility of a 21-day smartphone and social media (SSM) ban among 12-ye…

Encountering a homonym in a sentential context that biases interpretation towards its subordinate meaning makes that meaning easier to access later. This word-meaning priming effect is not restricted to homonyms and may be supported by general episodic memory processes. Such an account predicts that word-meaning priming may be affected by factors that affect episodic learning (e.g., predictability). Specifically, the contextual predictability of an incoming stimulus has been shown to affect episodic memory in that…

Sleep supports memory consolidation and next-day learning. The Active Systems model of consolidation proposes that sleep facilitates a shift in the memory retrieval network from hippocampus to neocortex in service of long-term storage. Accordingly, overnight consolidation may support efficient next-day learning. We tested this hypothesis across two preregistered behavioural experiments. In both experiments, participants learned a set of word pairs and recall was assessed before and after a 12-h delay containing ov…

The subordinate meaning of a homonym becomes temporarily more accessible after it is encountered, an effect termed word-meaning priming. Over the longer-term, word-meaning priming is better maintained across periods of sleep compared with wakefulness. This has been explained as sleep actively consolidating episodic memories related to recent linguistic events (Gaskell et al., 2019). Here, we tested this hypothesis by investigating whether word-meaning priming can be boosted following sleep using targeted memory re…

Sleep plays a crucial role in emotion processing, with sleep disruptions contributing to emotion dysregulation and increased risk of mental illness. This review examines the relationship between sleep and three key aspects of emotion processing: emotional reactivity, cognitive emotion regulation, and emotional inertia. Evidence suggests that sleep deprivation heightens emotional reactivity, weakens the ability to regulate emotions adaptively, and increases the persistence of negative emotions over time. Neurobiolo…