A comparison of four scales for anxiety, depresison, and neuroticism

Examined the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI), the Zung Self-Rating Depression Scale (SDS), AND THE Taylor Manifest Anxiety Scale (TMAS) for specificity and validity as measures of anxiety and depression. It was hypothesized that if the BDI and SDS were specific to symptoms of depression, they would show high correlations with each other, low correlations with the TMAS, and intermediate correlations with the Neuroticism scale of the Eysenck Personality Inventory (EPI-N). The four instruments were administered to 170 undergraduate students, and correlations and qualitative content analyses showed that the BDI, SDS and TMAS were intercorrelated significantly with the EPI-N scale and that item content overlapped heavily among the tests. The results suggest all four tests tap an emotionality factor of stability-instability.