My skin seems to be slacker

As we saw in the dermatological results, the subjects’ skin actually got tighter before it became slacker. However these results show that they perceived there skin to be getting consistently looser over the 48 hours.

My muscles ache and I feel stiff

The volunteers clearly felt they were getting more stiff as the sleep deprivation study went on. There may be a number of reasons for this. One explanation may just be that the subjects’ muscles would not have had their usual nights rest, resulting in aching and stiffness. Just like when you exercise more than you’re used to, or it could be the fact that they were sat in the same position for long periods.

I feel a bit stressed

The stress levels went consistently up during the study, as the subjects became more and more tired. This resulted in shorter tempers, more tetchiness and less patience. At the end of the study, many of the subjects admitted that this could have had a big effect on their feelings of how the rest of the group saw them (see below). One subject commented that, they felt that their personalities had become less attractive, and so they became less attractive as whole.

Meta perspectives - the way we think or feel about what others might think

This graph shows how the each member of the group thinks that the rest of the group saw them

They were asked to rate it between 1 and 7

1 = They think I look awful 7 = They think I look great

By totalling the number of 1s, 2s, 3s etc we can find an average for the whole group

It’s clear that over the 48 hours the subjects’ felt that the rest of the group found them ever increasingly unattractive – this may not seem surprising; But what we can see is that their feelings about how the others perceive them seem to be disproportionate to how they actually looked. Even those who showed the least physical signs of tiredness, thought that they had become far less attractive to others.

View the Dermatological Results