Morning or Evening Person

Summary: People who ranked higher for conscientiousness and lower in openness tend to be morning people, a new study reports. Researchers say the link between personality traits and morning/evening chronotype is partly due to genetic factors.

Source: University of Warwick

The link between the different hierarchies of personality, sleep patterns and even genetics has been discovered by researchers from the Department of Psychology at the University of Warwick.

A typical example of a morning person is thought to be someone who wakes up naturally at 6am, goes for a jog, showers, has breakfast and is ready for a productive day at work by 9am. Whereas an evening person struggles to get up in the morning and feels more productive in the evening.

Researchers from the University of Warwick with colleagues from the University of Tartu have recently had the paper, ‘Personality Traits Relate to Chronotype at Both the Phenotypic and Genetic Level’ published in the Journal of Personality, in which they have analysed the relationship between sleep timing (chronotype), preference to the morning/evening, and personality traits at a phenotypic and genetic level.

Ultimately the researchers have found that the relationship between personality and morningness-eveningness is partly due to genetic factors.

Using a large-scale sample of participants form the Estonian Biobank researchers asked them to answer questionnaires about their sleep timings and personality, personality was also assessed by someone who knew the participant well. Once answered researchers were able to identify the phenotypic relationships between the sleep and personality.

However they were also able to calculate the genetic correlations through summary statistics of large genome-wide association studies of personality and sleep preferences.

Personalities can be divided into three hierarchies: personality domains, facets and items, researchers analysed all three, but in particular they found on a domain level that people high in Conscientiousness and low in Openness were associated with being earlier chronotypes (i.e., they went to bed and got out of bed earlier).

On a facet level, researchers found that less straightforward (a facet of Agreeableness) and excitement-seeking (a facet of Extraversion), yet more self-disciplined (a facet of Conscientiousness) people were more likely to have earlier chronotypes. Higher Conscientiousness and lower Openness were also genetically related to preference for morningness.  TO READ MORE, CLICK HERE...