Park, Y.M.M., White, A.J., Jackson, C.L., Weinberg, C.R., Sandler, D.P. (2019). Association of exposure to artificial light at night while sleeping with risk of obesity in women. JAMA Internal Medicine. Web.
The article aims to explain research findings on the impact of sleep-related exposure to light on the likelihood of obesity. The article’s audience is the general public interested in recent research findings in biology, psychology, and healthcare. The type of this article is a news release published on the website of the National Institute of Health (Park et al., 2019).
The article concludes that exposure to artificial lights, incredibly bright light, or a TV during night sleep contributes to weight gain in women, which demonstrates the correlation between biological rhythms, sleep quality, and obesity. This article aims to improve people’s health by advancing their knowledge about biological psychology in general and sleep-related behavior in particular. The presented findings of the study have a significant potential for the field since they provide a basis for more in-depth research about brain function during sleep with and without light, which is likely to expand the scope of scientific knowledge about human health.
Spitschan, M., Stefani, O., Blattner, P., Gronfier, C., Lockley, S. W., & Lucas, R. J. (2019). How to report light exposure in human chronobiology and sleep research experiments. Clocks & Sleep, 1(3), 280-289. Web.
The purpose of Spitschan et al.’s (2019) research article is to report the research process, relevance, findings, and implications of a scientific study on the specifications of reporting the impact of light on human chronobiology. This article’s audience comprises academics and scholars involved in sleep and behavioral research and healthcare professionals who use evidence-based practice in their work.
As for the type of this article, it is a scholarly research paper in a scientific journal. It concludes that conventional metrics of reporting the exposure of humans to light during sleep that are currently used in research experimentation might be changed to include color and melanopsin-related characteristics of the spectrum. This article has positive implications for biological psychology since it broadens the perspectives on light’s effects on human chronobiology and behavior.