Changes in Psychological State Measures and Time of Day

Abstract

Psychological state measures were obtained on over two thousand junior high school students. Half of the students were tested relatively early in the day and the other half late in the day. Results indicated that self-reported measures of anxiety, stress, regression and depression tended to be higher for the group tested near the end of the school day than for those tested early in the day. A major methodological implication is that we should have separate norms for ‘time of day’ when we are dealing with state measures.