Behavior Type (Morning Type and Evening Type) and CMI

Abstract

Recently, many studieds have been reported in which a sleep-wake rhythm was regarded as an index of circadian rhythm. Also from the clinical view-pont, judgement of a style of sleep-wake rhythm is becoming more necessary. It is said that there are two styles of human behavior : the morning type and the evening type. Using Oquist's Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire (M-E Questionnaire), we have reported that there was no problem concerning its validity and reliability when we used it in Japan, and that was a close relationship between the style of human behavior and aging. In the present study, we investigated the relationship between the style of human behavior and the human character. Seventy-nine remitted patients (38 males and 41 females) were judged as to their behavior types Oquist's M-E Questionnaire in Japanese. Though the original questionnaire has 19 questions, we used 16 questions as the remaining 3 questions had significantly lower validity as we reported before. According to the total score of the 16 questions, behavior types were divided into 3 types : Evening type (total score of less than 36), Neither type (37-53), and Morning type (more than 54). At the same time we investigated the character type of the cases using Cornell Medical Index (CMI) in Japanese, and compared the results of CMI as to each behavior type. The results were as follows : (1) The cases of evening type complained more somatic disturbances and disturbances of moods and feelings than the cases of morning type. (2) Significant correlations were found between the scores of 4 items of CMI, namely, "fatigability", "frequency of illness", "inadequacy", and "anger", and the scores of M-E Questionnaire. Some authors have reported that there are a marked tendency of irregular style of sleep-wake rhythm in cases of evening types compared to the cases of morning types, and this fact is supposed to have a close relationship to our results that the cases of evening types complain more than the cases of morning types somatic disturbances and disturbances of moods and feelings. But as it is not clear whether the behavior type decides the character or the character decides the behavior type, further investigation is neccessary concerning to this issue.