Cognitive failures and circadian typology

The relationship between the occurrence of cognitive failures, personality, anxiety, and morningness–eveningness dimensions was investigated in a sample of Italian undergraduate students (N=390). Participants were administered the Cognitive Failure Questionnaire by Broadbent, Cooper, Fitzgerald, and Parkes (1982), the Morningness–Eveningness Questionnaire, the Eysenck Personality Questionnaire, and the State-Trait Anxiety Test. Participants having higher scores in neuroticism and anxiety reported to experience cognitive failures more frequently than participants with lower scores. Moreover extreme morning-types reported more cognitive failures than extreme-evening-types. The difference between the two circadian types was also related to the time of day when the failures usually happen: in extreme morning-types cognitive failures occurred especially in the evening hours, whereas in extreme-evening-types the occurrence was distributed more uniformly through all the day.