ERIC Number: EJ1482598
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2025-Dec
Pages: 11
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: N/A
EISSN: EISSN-2056-7936
Available Date: 2025-08-30
Updating Social Evaluation during Sleep
Haoyun Zhao1; Xiao Lin2; Kai Yuan2; Xiaoqing Hu3; Xikai Wang1; Waxun Su4; Qiandong Wang4; Lin Lu1,2,5
npj Science of Learning, v10 Article 65 2025
Sleep is instrumental in the formation of long-lasting memories, including social evaluations and social knowledge. The modification of social evaluations holds profound significance for understanding and shaping societal dynamics. Here, we investigated how sleep could contribute to updating the social evaluation of a person generally perceived as unattractive. We found that, compared with uncued names, auditory cueing (by playing the acoustic name+positive trait pairs) during sleep increased the perceived attractiveness of the mental representations of faces associated with the cued names. Notably, the number of slow oscillations detected during sleep was significantly positively correlated with the attractiveness ratings of the faces corresponding to the cued names. Importantly, a control experiment revealed that mere name exposure without positive traits during sleep did not enhance mental facial representations. These results highlight sleep's active role in updating social evaluations and suggest that sleep-mediated social evaluation updating can be applied in various social contexts.
Descriptors: Sleep, Interpersonal Relationship, Social Influences, Cues, Auditory Stimuli, Interpersonal Attraction, Evaluation, Personality Traits, Aesthetics
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Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Research
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
Sponsor: N/A
Authoring Institution: N/A
Grant or Contract Numbers: N/A
Data File: URL: https://osf.io/8nhv6/
Author Affiliations: 1Peking University, Peking-Tsinghua Center for Life Sciences and Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Beijing, China; 2National Clinical Research Center for Mental Disorders (Peking University Sixth Hospital), Peking University Sixth Hospital, Peking University Institute of Mental Health, NHC Key Laboratory of Mental Health (Peking University), Beijing, China; 3The University of Hong Kong, Department of Psychology, The State Key Laboratory of Brain and Cognitive Sciences, Hong Kong, China; 4Beijing Normal University, Beijing Key Laboratory of Applied Experimental Psychology, National Demonstration Center for Experimental Psychology Education (Beijing Normal University), Faculty of Psychology, Beijing, China; 5Peking University, PKU-IDG/McGovern Institute for Brain Research, Beijing, China