The purpose of this study is to develop a scale (Perinatal Anxiety Screening Scale, PASS) to screen for a broad range of problematic anxiety symptoms which is sensitive to how anxiety presents in perinatal women and is suitable to use in a variety of settings including antenatal clinics, inpatient and outpatient hospital and mental health treatment settings. Women who attended a tertiary obstetric hospital in the state of Western Australia antenatally or postpartum (n = 437) completed the PASS and other commonly used measures of depression and anxiety. Factor analysis was used to examine factor structure, and ROC analysis was used to evaluate performance as a screening tool. The PASS was significantly correlated with other measures of depression and anxiety. Principal component analyses (PCA) suggested a four-factor structure addressing symptoms of (1) acute anxiety and adjustment, (2) general worry and specific fears, (3) perfectionism, control and trauma and (4) social anxiety. The four subscales and total scale demonstrated high to excellent reliabilities. At the optimal cutoff score for detecting anxiety as determined by ROC analyses, the PASS identified 68 % of women with a diagnosed anxiety disorder. This was compared to the EPDS anxiety subscale which detected 36 % of anxiety disorders. The PASS is an acceptable, valid and useful screening tool for the identification of risk of significant anxiety in women in the perinatal period.

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Sleep disruption has been suggested to contribute to postpartum mood, but few studies have explored differences in this relationship between nulliparous and multiparous mothers. This study compared the interaction of sleep and mood as a function of parity. Thirty-five nulliparous and 34 multiparous mothers completed questionnaires on mood and sleep, and wore actigraphs for 7 days during the third trimester of pregnancy and within 2 weeks postpartum. Mood and objective sleep were better in multiparas than in nulliparas after delivery. However, other than a stronger association between subjective sleep and stress in nulliparous mothers, the relationship between sleep and mood did not differ significantly between the two groups. This suggests that parity might play only a limited role in the interaction between sleep and mood during the immediate postpartum period.

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This study examined the association between measures of objective sleep (OS) and subjective sleep (SS) to postpartum mood in healthy women from the third trimester of pregnancy to 10 to 12 weeks postpartum. Twenty-nine pregnant women completed self-report measures of mood and SS, and wore actigraphs for 7 continuous days during the third trimester (Time 1), within 15 days (Time 2), and 10 to 12 weeks postpartum (Time 3). The subjective perception of marked daytime dysfunction was associated with low mood during Time 1 and Time 3. Poor nighttime SS was related to low mood only at Time 2, whereas poor nighttime OS influenced stress during the same assessment time. These data indicate a stronger association between postpartum mood and the subjective perception of sleep than with OS quality and duration in healthy, non-depressed women, and highlight the awareness of poor daytime functioning as a significant contributor to new mothers' emotional wellbeing.

While adolescent-parent disagreements about family functioning are common, they may also be indicative of family members' health problems and may compromise adolescent adjustment. This study examines the association between maternal depressive symptoms and family functioning perceptions, considering both the adolescents' and their mothers' points of view. A sample of 943 Chilean dyads of adolescents (69% female, Mage = 14.43 years old) and their mothers (Mage = 43.20 years) reported their perceptions of family cohesion and adaptability. Mothers also reported their depressive symptoms. Results indicated that mothers perceived their family as more cohesive and more adaptable than their children. There was a negative association between maternal and adolescent reports of family cohesion and maternal depressive symptoms. In the mother' reports, this association depended on adolescent's age. In the case of adolescents' reports, this association depended on adolescent's gender. Finally, maternal depressive symptoms were a significant predictor of mother-adolescent agreement about family cohesion.Depression is a mental illness with a high international prevalence (Marcus, Yasamy, Ommeren, Chisholm, & Saxena, 2012). In Chile, 25.7% of women reported depressive symptoms in a national health survey (MINSAL, 2009(MINSAL, -2010. This percentage was 27.9% in the 25-45 age group and 30.1% in the 45-64 age group. It is likely that women belonging to these age groups are mothers of adolescent children.De Los Reyes and Kazdin (2005) have shown that depressed mothers have a negative bias in the perception of their children's emotional status and behavior, overestimating their adjustment problems. Similarly, Goodman (2007) suggested that depressed mothers have a negative vision of themselves in their maternal role. In line with these findings, the "Depression-distortion" hypothesis (DDH) states that depressed mothers overestimate their children's symptomatology (see Richters, 1992 for a review). However, it has been claimed that the DDH lacks empirical support owing to methodological deficiencies in the studies that have been developed to prove it (see Richters, 1992). Richters (1992) suggested that there is an association between maternal depression and mental health problems in children, rather than a distorted perception held by mothers about their children's mental health. In line with this suggestion, a meta-analysis (Goodman et al., 2011) indicated that maternal depression is associated with higher levels of internalization, externalization, and general psychopathology in children and adolescents, although to a small magnitude.Family functioning has been highlighted as a plausible mediating mechanism in the relationship between maternal depression and maladjustment in children and adolescents (Goodman,

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