Psychometric Properties of the Romanian Version of the Composite Scale of Morningness in Healthy Adults

ABSTRACT Morningness/eveningness is an attribute of human beings reflecting whether they are alert and prefer to be active early or late in the day. This paper aimed to introduce and preliminarily validate the Romanian translation of the Composite Scale of Morningness (CSM), as well as to set the cut-off points. Healthy, voluntary and unpaid students and adults (N=205), aged between 18 and 69, completed the questionnaire. Results showed that men scored higher than women, and the total score tended to increase with age. Cut-off scores were determined for three age groups: under 30, above 45 and intermediate. Internal validity was 0.875 and two components were extracted from the thirteen items. The questionnaire showed comparable psychometric properties to the existing versions in other languages. KEYWORDS: diurnal preference, morningness-eveningness, chronotype, circadian rhythms. INTRODUCTION Morningness-eveningness, also known as diurnal preference or chronotype, is a prominent inter-individual variable in circadian rhythms and is related to biological and behavioural differences among humans (Brown, Kunz, Dumas, Westermark, Vanselow, & Tilmann-Wahnschaffe, 2008; Smith, Reilly, & Midkiff, 1989). There are three major circadian types: morning, intermediate and evening. While the morning type ("lark") wakes up spontaneously early in the morning, is more active in the first part of the day and tends to go to bed early in the evening, the evening type ("owl") has trouble waking early in the morning and tends to be more active in the second part of the day. Those that fall between these behaviours are intermediate or neither type individuals (Horne & Ostberg, 1976). Most people are neither evening, nor morning types, but lie somewhere in between; estimates vary, but up to half of a given population may fall into the morning or evening classification (Paine, Gander, & Travier, 2006). Previous data suggests that evening types are prone to addiction (alcohol and coffee), are more often habitual smokers (Adan, 1994; Mecacci & Rocchetti, 1998; Taillard, Philip, Chastang, Diefenbach, & Bioulac, 2001) and display higher levels of anxiety than intermediate or morning types (Diaz-Morales & Sanchez- Lopez, 2008). Both clinically depressed and bipolar disorder patients were found to be more evening oriented than age- and sex-matched controls (Drennan, Klauber, Kripke, & Goyette, 1991; Mansour, Wood, Chowdari, Dayal, Thase, Kupfer et al., 2005) and it has been proposed that eveningness is a rather a pre-morbid trait than a characteristic of the depressive state (Drennan, et al., 1991). Eveningness was also linked with a higher risk of reporting depressive symptoms in healthy individuals (Hidalgo et al., 2009). Nevertheless, the interplay between chronotype and psychopathology may be more subtle and complex, as a recent study revealed that patients having the co-morbid alcohol use and bipolar disorders were more often of the morning type as compared with those with bipolar disorder only (Hatonen, Forsblom, Kieseppa, Lonnqvist, & Partonen, 2008). Diurnal preference is investigated using a number of validated questionnaires, such as the Composite Scale of Morningness (Smith et al, 1989). Previous studies have indicated that there are differences in the Composite Scale scores and the subsequent categorization of chronotypes, implying that it is of importance to validate translations of the questionnaire for different cultural and age groups (Caci et al., 2005; Smith et al., 2002). Purpose of this study To validate the Romanian translation of the Composite Scale of Morningness (CSM) and set the cut-off points for the Romanian population. MATERIALS AND METHODS Participants The study was approved by the Ethics Committee of "Iuliu Hatieganu" Medicine and Pharmacy University and by the Institutional Review Board of "Babes-Bolyai" University, Cluj-Napoca. …