Psychometric properties of the Spanish version of Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scales (DASS)

measure anxiety and depression (Clark & Watson, 1991). Because of that, several authors have used factor analysis to develop anxiety and depression scales with a greater divergent validity. The most recent is that of Lovibond and Lovibond (1995a, 1995b). Their work led to the Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scales (DASS), each of which contains 14 items. The Depression scale assesses dysphoria, hopelessness, devaluation of life, self-deprecation, lack of interest or involvement, anhedonia, and inertia. The Anxiety scale concerns somatic and subjective symptoms of fear, and assesses autonomic arousal, skeletal musculature effects, situational anxiety, and subjective experience of anxious affect; however, the threat of future harm is not considered. The Stress scale measures non-specific, persistent arousal and tension; it assesses difficulty relaxing, nervous arousal, and being easily upset/agitated, irritable/over-reactive and impatient. Lovibond and Lovibond (1995a) have also derived a short-form of the questionnaire containing 21 items, 7 for each scale, and called DASS-21. The correlation between the Anxiety and Depression scales of the DASS is moderately high, although it is lower than that found with other instruments; for clinical samples it is .44 to .51 (Antony, Bieling, Cox, Enns and Swinson, 1999; Brown, Chorpita, Korotitsch and Barlow, 1997) and for non-clinical samples .54 (Lovibond and Lovibond, 1995a, 1995b). The psychometric properties of the DASS have been studied in samples from Australia (Lovibond and Lovibond, 1995a, 1995b; Lovibond, 1998), the United States (Antony et al., 1998; Brown et al., 1997), Canada (Clara, Cox and Enns, 2001) and the Netherlands (de Beurs, van Dyck, Marquenie, Lange and Blonk, 2001). The internal consistency (Cronbach’s alpha) of the Depression, Anxiety and Stress scales has been found to be .91, .84 and .90, respectively, in university students, and somewhat higher in clinical samples. In terms of their correlations with other measures of anxiety and depression the Depression and Anxiety scales of the DASS show a satisfactory convergent validity and an acceptable divergent validity. First, the Depression and Anxiety scales of the DASS have correlated from .74 to .84 with the Beck Depression Inventory (BDI; Beck, Rush, Shaw and Emery, 1979) and the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI, Beck and Steer, 1993) respectively. Second, these correlations have been stronger than those between the Depression scale and the BAI (.40 to .54) and between the Anxiety scale and the BDI (.49 to .58). Furthermore, relative to the other two DASS scales, (a) the Depression scale has correlated more strongly with another measures of depression, (b) the Anxiety scale has correlated more strongly with another measures of anxiety, and (c) the Stress scale has correlated more strongly with measures of negative affect and worry. Psychometric properties of the Spanish version of Depression, Anxiety and Stress Scales (DASS)