Chronotype tests

Your chronotype is your body's natural tendency to feel most alert and perform best at certain hours of the day rather than others. It isn't a habit you pick out of preference, or a matter of willpower: it has a real biological basis, tied to the so-called circadian clock, the internal mechanism that regulates your sleep-wake cycle over a period of roughly 24 hours.

• Morning chronotype: wakes up easily, performs best early in the day, and tires early in the evening.
• Evening chronotype: struggles to get going in the morning, hits its stride in the afternoon or at night, and goes to bed late.
• Intermediate chronotype: shows no strong lean toward either extreme, and is, in fact, the largest group in most population studies.

A field of study with almost 50 years of history

Scientific interest in measuring these individual differences took off in the 1970s. The most cited instrument in the academic literature is the questionnaire published by psychologist James Horne and physiologist Olov Östberg in 1976, designed to sort a person into one of five categories ranging from "definitely morning type" to "definitely evening type." Since then, other researchers have proposed revised and alternative versions, such as the Composite Scale of Morningness by Smith, Reilly, and Midkiff (1989), or Roenneberg's Munich ChronoType Questionnaire, which instead of asking about preferences asks directly what time you fall asleep and wake up on workdays and free days.

Not the same as being "disciplined" or "lazy"

One of the most consistent findings in this field is that chronotype has a genetic component and shifts in a fairly predictable way with age: teenagers tend to drift toward eveningness, and a good part of the population drifts back toward morningness from middle age onward. Calling someone "lazy" for waking up late, or "boring" for going to bed early, ignores this biological basis.

Our test is an original, informational take inspired by this line of scientific research: it does not reproduce or replace any copyrighted clinical questionnaire, and its result is meant as orientation, not a medical diagnosis.

Sources

• Horne, J. A., & Östberg, O. (1976). A self-assessment questionnaire to determine morningness-eveningness in human circadian rhythms. International Journal of Chronobiology, 4, 97-110.
• Smith, C. S., Reilly, C., & Midkiff, K. (1989). Evaluation of three circadian rhythm questionnaires with suggestions for an improved measure of morningness. Journal of Applied Psychology, 74(5), 728-738.
• Neubauer, A. C. (1992). Psychometric comparison of two circadian rhythm questionnaires and their relationship with personality. Personality and Individual Differences, 13(2), 125-131.
• Roenneberg, T., Wirz-Justice, A., & Merrow, M. (2003). Life between clocks: daily temporal patterns of human chronotypes. Journal of Biological Rhythms, 18(1), 80-90.
• Díaz Morales, J. F., & Aparicio García, M. (2003). Relaciones entre matutinidad-vespertinidad y estilos de personalidad. Anales de Psicología, 19(2), 247-256.
• Fernández, N., Hinojal, R., Díaz, J., Sáiz, P. A., González, M. P., & Bobes, J. (2003). Valoración de tipología circadiana en trabajadores de un hospital general. Archivos de Prevención de Riesgos Laborales, 6(1), 77-83.