Effects of Gain/Loss Messages on Reinforcing Motivation to Sleep
Authors: Ono Shugo , Nambu Aoi , Kamada Kouki , Nakata Toru , Sakamoto Takashi , Kato Toshikazu 
Published: October 2023

To improve sleep habits, we will create messages to raise awareness of sleep and examine the effects of messaging on sleep habits. Japanese people, especially children, and workers, sleep less than their counterparts, both men and women, in other countries. As a result, some people "sleep in on weekends," getting a lot of sleep on weekends to secure more sleep. Then, the rhythm becomes disturbed, and it becomes challenging to re-synchronize with the schedule. Therefore, it is necessary to improve sleeping habits to secure a certain amount of sleep. This study will utilize a messaging approach, gain/loss-framing messages. Then, we will investigate which message is more effective for sleep habits according to each participant's values about sleep. This experiment first administered a questionnaire to 130 college students and adults to assess their attitudes and values toward sleep. We conducted an exploratory factor analysis of 83 items of the questionnaire. As a result, factor scores were calculated for each respondent, and a total of six clusters were determined by cluster analysis. For the experiment, a total of 10 participants (college students in their 20s), five each with high factor scores, were selected from the "sleep-oriented" and "sleep-unoriented" types. The selected participants wore wristwatch-type terminals and went to bed after checking the messages sent to them. Participants received each of seven different kinds of gain/loss-framing messages per week. In questionnaires on 14 different messages, participants responded to the acceptability of the messages and changes in their attitudes toward sleep, such as going to bed early, getting up early, and reviewing their daily rhythms. A two-way ANOVA was conducted at the 5% significance level on the change in sleep awareness after confirmation of the sent message and on the evaluation of the acceptability of the sent message. We identified significant differences in sleep awareness in the main effects between clusters and in the interaction between clusters and message type. Sleep-oriented types tended to report more change in sleep awareness with loss-framing messages. In comparison, sleep-unoriented types tended to report more change in sleep awareness with gain-framing messages. Mean sleep time (minutes) during each period was calculated for each participant, and a two-way ANOVA was performed with message content and clusters as factors at a 5% significance level. We didn't find significant differences between clusters, message types, or interactions. However, sleep-oriented types tended to sleep longer than sleep-unoriented types. Furthermore, in both clusters, sleep duration tended to be longer in weeks when they received loss-framing messages than in weeks when they received gain-framing messages. The interventions in this study produced changes in sleep attitudes, but these changes differed across clusters. On the other hand, all clusters showed a trend toward longer sleep duration for loss-framing messages. In other words, changes in sleep attitudes may not be directly reflected in behavior, and we need to investigate this in the future.