A child version of the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS;D. Watson, L. A. Clark, & A. Tellegen, 1988), the PANAS-C, was developed using students in Grades 4-8 (N = 707). Item selection was based on psychometric and theoretical grounds. The resulting Negative Affect (NA) and Positive Affect (PA) scales demonstrated good convergent and discriminant validity with existing self-report measures of childhood anxiety and depression; the PANAS-C performed much like its adult namesake. Overall, the PANAS-C, like the adult PANAS, is a brief, useful measure that can be used to differentiate anxiety from depression in youngsters. As such, this instrument addresses the shortcomings of existing measures of childhood anxiety and depression.

The tripartite model of depression and anxiety suggests that depression and anxiety have shared (generalized negative affect) and specific (anhedonia and physiological hyperarousal) components. In one of the 1st studies to examine the structure of mood-related symptoms in youngsters, this model was tested among 116 child and adolescent psychiatric inpatients, ages 8-16 (M = 12.46; SD = 2.33). Consistent with the tripartite model, a 3-factor (Depression, Anxiety, and Negative Affect) model represented the observed data well. Follow-up analyses suggested that a nonhierarchical arrangement of the 3 factors may be preferable to a hierarchical one.

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Used a joint factor analysis with the Children's Depression Inventory (CDI; Kovacs, 1980/81, 1992) and Revised Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale (RCMAS; C. R. Reynolds & Richmond, 1978, 1985) to identify items that uniquely measured depression and anxiety. Data from 750 youngsters in Grades 4 through 7 were analyzed using principal-axis factoring with an oblique rotation. Salient factors were identified using guidelines provide by Gorsuch (1997). Item overlap and the large negative affectivity component across instruments were evident. Items that overlapped or had nonsalient loadings were eliminated. The sample was randomly split into 2 groups of 375 and analyses were repeated. Results indicated that a unique 9-item depression factor composed largely of items representing a negative view of oneself existed. In addition, a unique 7-item anxiety factor emerged that consisted of items reflecting worry. The validity of these abbreviated scales was explored using a separate sample of 131 students in Grades 4 through 9. The abbreviated scales were correlated with scales of positive and negative affect consistent with predictions. Findings suggest exploring alternative scoring strategies for the CDI and RCMAS to eliminate problems associated with overlapping items.

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