It Kills to Not Sleep...Apparently

It Kills to Not Sleep…Apparently

Does sleep deprivation as a teen cause you to commit a crime 14 years later? According to a study reported by the Daily Mail in London, a professor of criminology, psychiatry, and psychology at the University of Pennsylvania is claiming this fact. Adrian Raine is claiming that sleep deprivation as a teen makes you 5 times more likely to commit a crime as an adult. How he went about testing this hypothesis was that he asked 101 15-year-old boys how sleep deprived they felt on a scale of 1-7 where 1 is very alert and 7 is very drowsy. He brought each boy into his lab and measured their brain-wave activity and he also measured their level of attention to a tone played in headphones they were provided. Per Raine, this was representative of brain-attention function. He also spoke with teachers of the boys and asked them how social they were as students. 15 years later he looked up criminal records of the 101 boys he studied, and 17 percent of them had committed a crime by that point in adulthood.

            If any of this seems completely confusing and random to you, then you are not the only one. So much of this study raised red flags to me that the data can’t be considered factual and relevant to what was trying to be measured. For one, nowhere in the article does it state how they chose the boys they tested. Did they test students with bad grades? Did they test students who looked tired?  It is never clearly stated, and this is a cause for concern because they could have chosen children that had already had criminal records prior to testing which would have skewed the data. Another point of confusion that struck me when reading the article was the fact that they asked the boys how tired they were at 1 pm and at 3 pm, before and after testing their brain-attention levels that I spoke about in the first paragraph. First, they arbitrarily chose these times, meaning there was no real reason for choosing 1 pm and 3 pm other than the fact that this was when they were available to test the students. Second, the data they obtained could again be skewed and biased since they asked these children in the afternoon if they felt tired, and speaking from experience, most students, having been awake for several hours at this point, feel more energized in the early afternoon as compared to the morning thus leading to my conclusion that this data is again biased. Regarding the asking of teachers about how the students were socially, this again could have been falsified and biased. The teachers could have been aware of the study going on, seeing as there is no mention of how the teachers were selected, and the data could have been skewed to favor the results the researchers were trying to obtain. Also, most students are less social in school settings because they are there to get an education rather than fool around with friends, so asking the teachers isn’t the best measure of social behavior for these kids. Lastly, no results were given about how students responded to the questions of how sleep deprived they felt, no results were given about how many students were deemed anti-social, and no results were given regarding the brain-attention level of these students. They then proceeded to state that 15 years later, another arbitrary number, 17 percent of the 101 students they had tested had been involved in a crime by this time. How can you randomly state something like that with no discussion of results, or even a mention of data received? To me this whole article can’t be taken seriously and without substantial facts, it is impossible to conclude that teens who are sleep deprived are 5 times more likely to commit a crime in adulthood.

          Taking a biological standpoint there are numerous facts stated in the study that aren’t conclusive to conclude sleep deprivation as a teenager causes criminal behavior as an adult. One problem that I have with the study is that they studied brain-wave activity to test for brain-attention function to see how tired students were. This could very easily have been disrupted by a number of factors such as drugs such as anti-depressants or stimulants which are often taken in teenagers in the form of caffeine and anti-depressant medications in teens with anxiety disorders. These types of drugs have a significant effect not only on the attention span of the students, but also the brain activity whether it be an increase or decrease to activity. Another problem I had with this study is the fact that anxiety itself can cause students to have increased brain activity in the form of activating the “fight or flight response.”  Approximately 10% of teenagers have anxiety in the United States so it’s certainly not out of the realm of possibility that some of these studied teenagers had anxiety which could have caused specific responses in the brain tests. In a study that looked at the effects of poor sleep and whether or not this caused aggressive and violent behavior the researchers stated, “In most people poor sleep will not evoke actual physical aggression, but certain individuals, such as forensic psychiatric patients, may be particularly vulnerable to the emotional dysregulating effects of sleep disturbances.” More than one factor is at play when it comes to aggressive and violent behavior than just sleep deprivation, therefore stating that there is a correlation between sleep deprivation and criminal activity in the future is incorrect. It is no surprise to anyone that not getting enough sleep can cause you to be angrier and more irritable, but to make the conclusion that lack of sleep in teenagers causes criminal behavior in the future is absurd.

Posted by Nicolas Baltayan (Group A – Week 4)