Costa/Lievore reported in (10.1080/00140138908966104): "Conversely, morningness appeared to be
unrelated to long-term tolerance, but did influence circadian adjustments and
sleep behaviour." in their abstract.
Data 2010 Kantermann SW to go
In the case of fixed night shifts, an evening type may be in a certain advantage, but in the case of rotating shiftwork not so much, morning shifts will be difficult to cope with. Perhaps more important than the chronotype is the history of adaptation to shifts (either due to change in time zones or work schedules) - some people seem to tolerate better such challenges, others get sick.
True indeed. It is known that e.g. older people adopt less to shift work. Couldn't this be related to weaker amplitudes in their circadian rhythms? However, most of the case studies I am aware of discuss results of a few subjects. Perhaps there are masking selection effects on the chronotypes - that is those who can adopt remain in such jobs? A large database could certainly reveal such causalities.
We examined chronotype and shiftwork adaptation and found that indeed, night shift workers were more likely to consider themselves late types than early types. We also found that early types were very well adapted to day shift and poorly adapted to night shift while late types were not well adapted to either type of shift. We discussed these results in terms of social jet lag.
Also, regarding the comment above, one may assume that evening types may adapt better to night shift if they are permanent night shift but our research suggests this is not true, primarily due to the fact that in our sample, 97% of shift workers prefer to sleep at night on days off. This means that the worker is constantly jet lagged when working and on off days.
Karen, thanks a lot for your thoughts! I looked at your publication "Shift work in nurses" with great interest. Almost 400 persons is a pretty significant random sample of shift workers, and Figure 1C is exactly the kind of histogram I was looking for :-)
The section about the sleep strategies on free days and the related subjetive adaptability is great, too (among all the other aspects).
Great work, thanks a lot!
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