Caroline Hoyniak, Ph.D.

Fellow in Child & Adolescent Depression

Project Details

Project summary

Sleep and circadian rhythm disturbances (i.e., insomnia, excessive variability in sleep schedules, short sleep durations) are thought to play a crucial role in increasing risk for depression. Regularizing daily sleep/activity rhythms is a frequent target of treatment for depression and has shown efficacy for reducing symptoms in adults, potentially through its effects on regularizing affect fluctuations throughout the day. The proposed study will investigate sleep and affective rhythms in the context of early childhood depression, a disorder for which few efficacious treatments exist. The first aim of this study is to compare sleep/activity and affect rhythms between a newly collected sample of preschoolers with elevated depression symptoms and an existing community sample of preschoolers. The second aim of the proposed study is to examine daily, within-child associations between sleep/activity rhythms, social rhythms (i.e., daily activities including mealtimes, exercise, socialization), and affect in preschoolers with elevated depression symptoms.