As reported in TheAtlantic.com, scientists in Russia are proposing that there are actually four chronotypes beyond the late (owls) and early (larks) risers. Instead, there are people who feel energetic in both the mornings and evenings, as well as people who feel lethargic all day.
In a study detailed in the journal Personality and Individual Differences, biologist Arcady Putilov, and his colleagues at the Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, asked 130 people to stay awake for 24 hours. The subjects filled out questionnaires about how awake they felt, their sleep patterns, and how well they had functioned during the previous week.
“The results showed that among them were 29 larks, who showed higher energy levels at 9 a.m. than at 9 p.m., and 44 owls, for whom the opposite was true,” writes Olga Khazan for The Atlantic. “The owls also went to bed about two hours later, on average, than the larks. But the rest of the group fell into neither of these patterns.”
As BPS Research Digest puts it: There was a “high energetic” group of 25 people who reported feeling relatively sprightly in both the morning and evening; and a “lethargic” group of 32 others, who described feeling relatively dozy in both the morning and evening.
The next big question is, writes Khazan with tongue firmly in cheek: “What bird names to assign these two new groups. Lazy Bird and hummingbird? The albatross and the peregrine falcon?”
Source: The Atlantic