Recent research has pointed to the importance of cognitive activity in interfering with sleep, and suggested a close relationship between worry and insomnia. To explore the relationship between worry and insomnia in more detail, a sample was studied in which worry and insomnia were combined in a 2 x 2 design. The content of sleep-interfering cognitions was explored both with a previously developed Sleep Disturbance Questionnaire and a newly developed checklist of the content of thoughts that arose if people could not sleep. Both supported the importance of a distinction between sleep-related and other thoughts. Whereas worried insomniacs show a broad range of sleep-interfering thoughts, the thoughts of non-worried insomniacs focused mainly on sleep itself.

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Memory and psychomotor performance is impaired on the morning after heavy 'social' drinking.

SynopsisStudies of experimentally induced respiratory infections and illnesses showed that influenza impaired performance on a visual search task but had no effect on a simple motor task, whereas colds impaired the motor task but not the search task. The effect of influenza on the search task was observed in both volunteers with significant clinical symptoms and volunteers who were shown, by virological techniques, to be infected but who had no significant clinical illness. Performance was also impaired during the incubation period of this illness, which confirms that subclinical influenza virus infections can have behavioural effects. In contrast to influenza, the effects of colds were restricted to volunteers who had significant clinical symptoms, and the impairments in performance were observed only when the symptoms were apparent.