The Visual Analogue Scale for Anxiety: A Validation Study*

The quest for accurate measures of anxiety has produced many scales, though very few which are‘both brief and valid and can be used for frequent and repeated measurements. McReynolds (1 968) in an extensive review of 88 formal anxiety assessment procedures noted the less than satisfactory status of anxiety assessment technology, and also concluded that relatively simple and straightforward self-rating measures often represent the techniques of choice, particularly in the measurement of current anxiety. One self-rating scale ideally suited to frequent and repeated measurements is the visual analogue or graphic rating scale, described over 50 years ago (Freyd, 1923) but relatively little used in clinical contexts until recently. Six recent studies (Zealley and Aitken, 1969; Crawford Little and McPhail, 1973; Folstein and Luria, 1973; Byrne, 1975; Davies, Burrows, and Poynton, 1975; Luria, 1975) have shown the visual analogue scale to be a valid and reliable measure of depressive mood. In two of these studies (Folstein and Luria, 1973, Davies et al., 1975) the visual analogue scale was also used as a measure of anxiety, with unimpressive results. Both studies used as the criterion measure the Manifest Anxiety Scale (Taylor, 1953) which may be considered a measure of trait (characteristic) rather than state (current) anxiety.