STUDENT: Marquis Baskerville

ADVISOR: Dr. Renae McNair

ABSTRACT:

Quality sleep has been understood to be highly crucial to overall health and psychological well-being that we rely on daily to function. This study’s aim is to further understand extant chronobiological research on circadian preference (chronotype), the terms “morningness” and “eveningness”, and the relationship between eveningness, sleep disturbances, and depression. Circadian preference is defined as an individual’s daily biological preference to induce or delay sleep. Morningness was defined as preferring peak activity and inducing sleep in earlier hours of the day. Eveningness was defined as preferring peak activity and inducing sleep in the later evening hours of the day. A randomized sample of 500 college students was selected for the sleep study and assessed using the Morningness-Eveningness Questionnaire and Beck’s Depression Inventory scale to assess circadian preference and depressive symptomatology. Sleep diaries were given to participants to record subjective sleep experiences for each night of the study for a two-week period. Objective measures were captured using an actigraph wristwatch that assessed physiological signs of sleep disturbance during sleep. Participants were asked to follow their normal daily routines and report their sleep and overall depressiveness as soon as they awaken from sleep. Participants were assessed before and after the two-week period and all recordings of chronotype, sleep, and depressive symptoms were compared. Participants were given informed consent about the study and were told that this sleep study is a hybridized “”assessment in-lab”” and “”sleep at-home”” experiment. It was hypothesized that eveningness chronotypes will experience more depressive symptomatology than morningness chronotypes.