A 16-item scale to measure optimism-pessimism was developed and administered to 160 subjects to investigate differences in personality traits as related to circadian rhythm functioning. Evening types were significantly more pessimistic than morning types. Other results showed that men and women did not differ significantly with respect to either optimism-pessimism or morningness-eveningness. Finally, while increased age was mildly correlated with morningness, it appeared to have little relationship to optimism-pessimism.
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