“…It is common for measures of anxiety that have been developed for the general population, such as the Beck Anxiety Inventory (Beck and Steer, 1993) and the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale (Lovibond and Lovibond, 1995a), to be used to classify perinatal women according to established severity ranges. However, these measures are limited at indicating the severity of anxiety in the perinatal period because (1) the cut-off scores may not have been validated in perinatal samples, (2) scores may be confounded by physical symptoms that occur commonly in pregnancy or postnatally (Swallow et al, 2003), as scales include items about physical symptoms of anxiety (e.g., 'I experienced breathing difficulty' (Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scale, Lovibond and Lovibond, 1995a), 'discomfort in abdomen', 'difficulty breathing' (Beck Anxiety Inventory;Beck and Steer, 1993)), and (3) pregnancy-specific anxieties (e.g., severe fear of childbirth) are not addressed. Measures developed to assess perinatal anxiety, such as the Pregnancy Anxiety Scale (Levin, 1991), Pregnancy Related Anxiety Questionnaire ( Van den Bergh, 1989), and Pregnancy Related Anxiety Scale (Wadhwa et al, 1993), are also limited at indicating severity of anxiety in the perinatal period because they assess narrow domains of perinatal anxiety such as the mother's fears about the birth, the pregnancy and the baby's health and safety (see Somerville et al (2014) for summary).…”