Sleep-deprived people, or those performing extended monotonous tasks, can exhibit brief episodes in which they suspend performance and appear to fall asleep momentarily—behavioral microsleeps (‘‘microsleeps’’). In this study, microsleeps were identified using eye video and tracking response during a 20-min continuous tracking task undertaken by 16 healthy volunteers (mean age 24.9 yrs; 8 females, 8 males) in the early afternoon following a normally rested night and a night of restricted sleep (time-in-bed restricted to 4 h). Sessions were 1 wk apart and counterbalanced. Wrist actigraphy, self-reported sleepiness, and sleep quality were also recorded. We hypothesized that high microsleep rates when normally rested or after a night of sleep restriction would be related to poor sleep quality, sleep disturbance, circadian type, irregular sleep patterns, low daily sleep duration, or poor sleep efficiency. We also hypothesized that prior performance on a 10-min psychomotor vigilance task (PVT) (mean reaction time or number of PVT lapses) would be related to the number of microsleeps during the tracking task and that PVT performance could, therefore, be used as a fitness-for-duty indicator. The number of microsleeps during the tracking task increased following sleep restriction (mean 11.4 versus 27.9; p 0.03). There were no correlations between the number of microsleeps in the normally rested session and any of the actigraphically measured or self-reported sleep measures. However, the number of microsleeps following sleep restriction was correlated with sleep efficiency

License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. The aim of the study was to elucidate the immediate, intermediate, and anticipatory sleepiness reducing effects of a salutogenic self-care procedure called progressive muscle relaxation (PMR), during lunch breaks. The second exploratory aim deals with determining the onset and long-term time course of sleepiness changes. In order to evaluate the intraday range and interday change of the proposed relaxation effects, 14 call center agents were assigned to either a daily 20-minute self-administered PMR or a small talk (ST) group during a period of seven months. Participants ’ levels of sleepiness were analyzed in a controlled trial using anticipatory, postlunchtime, and afternoon changes of sleepiness as indicated by continuously determined objective reaction time measures (16,464 measurements) and self-reports administered five times per day, once per month (490 measurements). Results

The degree of sleepiness in the Sleepy Language Corpus from the Interspeech 2011 Speaker State Challenge is predicted with regres-sion and a very large feature vector. Most notable is the great gender difference which can mainly be attributed to females showing their sleepiness less than males do. Index Terms — Sleepiness, paralinguistics, regression, brute forcing, gender differences