Hartford Hospital
The goal of this clinical trial is to learn how hot indoor temperatures affect mood in young adults with depression, with or without anxiety. It will also explore whether the time of day the heat happens matters, and whether changes in sleep, thinking, and daily activity help explain the effect. The main questions it aims to answer are: * Does heat during the day affect mood differently than heat at night? * Do changes in sleep, thinking, or activity help explain those effects? Researchers will compare a weekend that is hot during the day to a weekend that is hot at night to see how the timing of heat affects mood. Participants will take part for about four weeks. During that time, participants will: * Stay in a sleep lab for two weekends, two weeks apart. Each stay runs from Friday afternoon to Monday midday. * Spend one weekend in rooms that are hot (32°C, or 90°F) from 8 in the morning to 8 at night, and comfortable (22°C, or 72°F) overnight * Spend the other weekend in rooms that are comfortable (22°C, or 72°F) during the day and hot (32°C, or 90°F) overnight * Be woken up at 2 in the morning on the last night of each lab stay. Participants will answer questions and do short thinking tasks, then go back to sleep. * Wear sensors that track their sleep, heart rate, and body temperature, and swallow a small capsule that measures body temperature from the inside * Answer questions about their mood and do short thinking tasks, both in the lab and at home * Use a phone app for the whole four weeks of the study. The app asks about mood and sleep, and works with the sensors to track sleep, movement, heart rate, temperature, and humidity.
BACKGROUND AND RATIONALE Rising ambient temperatures are associated with worsening mood outcomes, and young adults with depressive disorders may be particularly susceptible. The mechanisms underlying this association remain poorly characterized. Three candidate pathways are measurable and potentially modifiable: sleep-wake disturbance, impaired cognitive performance, and reduced physical activity. Establishing whether these pathways carry the effect of heat on mood would identify targets for intervention that do not require modifying the thermal environment itself, which is often less modifiab…
Inclusion Criteria: * 18 ≥ age ≤ 25 at time of consent * has current depression as measured by a PHQ-9 score \>9 and corroborated by the DIAMOND Diagnostic Interview * resides within 75 mi. of Yale Biobehavioral Laboratory * willing/able to travel up to 75 mi. each way by car from their home to the Yale Biobehavioral Laboratory and back to their home * speaks/reads English fluently (surveys, interviews, and study measures are only validated in English; translating materials without proper validation could lead to responses that are not truly comparable, threatening reliability; limitations in…
* Ambient temperature within the laboratory is set to 32 degrees Celsius (\~90 F) * Ambient humidity is set to \~13g/m³
* Ambient temperature within the laboratory is set to 22 degrees Celsius (\~72 F) * Ambient humidity is set to maintain \~13g/m³