Working evening shifts? You can be prone to anxiety disorders and PTSD incidents, reveals study
The susceptibility of people with evening chronotypes to anxiety, PTSD, and similar disorders may be mediated by impaired fear acquisition.
Research suggests that disrupted emotional learning may contribute to the greater susceptibility of evening chronotype people—those who typically perform better at night or in the early morning—to anxiety and related issues.
Do you know what your chronotype is?
Chronotypes are the differences in behaviour that each person exhibits in response to their varying amounts of sleep and alertness throughout a 24-hour day.
The term "circadian preference profiles" is another name for it. There are three personality kinds: evening types (those who prefer to stay up longer and are more productive at night or in the early morning), morning types (those who prefer to rise early and do best in activities that begin in the morning), and intermediate types (if we easily adapt to morning and evening schedules).
Circadian rhythms are being studied more and more because they can provide insight into the genesis of mental illnesses including anxiety and post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
Researchers Chiara Lucifora, Giorgio M. Grasso, Michael A. Nitsche, Giovanni D'Italia, Mauro Sortino, Mohammad A. Salehinejad, Alessandra Falzone, Alessio Avenanti, and Carmelo M. Vicario used the conventional Pavlovian paradigm of fear conditioning to investigate the neurocognitive underpinnings of the association between chronotype and fear responses in healthy humans.
The paper discusses increased fear acquisition in those with evening chronotypes. The "Virtual Reality Fear Conditioning/Extinction Study" was conducted by researchers from the Universita Degli Studi di Messina and Universita di Bologna in Italy, the Leibniz Research Center for Working Environment and Human Factors in Germany, and Universidad Catolica Del Maule in Chile. The study involved 40 participants—20 evening chronotypes and 20 controls—recruited from students at the University of Messina.
According to Carmelo M. Vicario, a researcher funded by the BIAL Foundation, "To the best of our knowledge, only one study (Pace-Schott et al., 2015) to date explored the role of chronotypes on the fear acquisition and extinction in healthy humans, but did not test intermediate chronotypes, the ideal control group as they are the most frequent chronotype in the population."
The results from the two groups corroborated past studies that connected the evening chronotype to a higher incidence of PTSD and anxiety disorders. The findings in the two groups revealed that participants with evening chronotypes acquired dread at a higher rate than those with intermediate chronotypes.
The higher susceptibility of the evening chronotype to anxiety and related diseases may be mediated by altered fear acquisition, according to Vicario. "This study provides fresh insights on the influence of circadian rhythms on cognitive and affective processes."
(With inputs from ANI)