Habitual daily ‘Good Morning’ message senders reveal the status of their own circadian clock

ABSTRACT

As of October 2018, about 1.5 billion people around the world use WhatsApp (WA) for messaging, chatting, and for sharing pictures and videos. Indians send “Good Morning” messages religiously to their online friends and acquaintances almost every day. However, we hardly know about the psychophysiological basis of the behavior characterized by habitual conveyance of “Good Morning,” and “Good Night,” messages using online Apps. In this study, we attempted to analyze at the individual level if this behavior on WA reflects the user’s circadian timing system. We retrieved chats with time stamps from eight subjects and computed periods of the daily “good morning” messaging behavior of each subject. We computed deviations of average periods in each subject from the theoretical circadian period. Single sample two-tailed t-test revealed that none of the average periods of daily message sending habits of eight subjects was statistically significantly different from the theoretical circadian period of the population. All eight subjects, therefore, revealed entrained circadian rhythm in their messaging behavior. This is perhaps the first study to propose that the timings of the social media messages could be used to gauge the status of the endogenous circadian clock of the users of Social Networking Sites (SNSs).

KEYWORDS:

• WhatsApp
• Circadian Period
• Good Morning Message
• Messaging Habit
• Check Your Clock

Acknowledgments

The authors are obliged to the Head of the Department, School of Zoology, Gangadhar Meher University, Amruta Vihar, Sambalpur – 768 004, Odisha, India for extending all facilities during the study and the preparation of this manuscript. We are indebted to Dr. Arti Parganiha of School of Studies in Life Science, Pt. Ravishankar Shukla University, Raipur – 492 010, India for reading an earlier draft of this paper and for offering valuable suggestions for improvement.

Author contribution

RKS collected and analyzed data.

AKP designed the study, interpreted the data and wrote the paper.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Funding

This work is a part of the PhD program of one of the authors (RKS). The authors did not receive any financial support from any extra-mural funding agency, except the routine facilities that were extended to the authors by the Gangadhar Meher University, Amruta Vihar, Sambalpur 768004, Odisha, India.