Structure and Psychometric Properties of the Penn State Worry Questionnaire for Children in Chinese Adolescents
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Structure and Psychometric Properties of the Penn State Worry Questionnaire for Children in Chinese Adolescents Yixing Liu 1 & Jie Zhong 1
# Springer Science+Business Media, LLC, part of Springer Nature 2020
Abstract The present research introduced the Penn State Worry Questionnaire for Children (PSWQ-C) to China and evaluated its structure and psychometric properties in Chinese adolescent samples. The PSWQ-C is a 14-item self-report questionnaire designed to measure the generality, excessiveness, and uncontrollability aspects of pathological worries in children and adolescents. Factor analysis results suggested that the three reverse-scored items represented one or more unknown factors rather than worry; thus, they were discarded and the remaining 11 positively worded items formed the Chinese version of the PSWQ-C (CH-PSWQ-C). The CH-PSWQ-C was found to have acceptable internal consistency reliability and favorable convergent and divergent validity by examining its correlations with measures of anxiety, depression, and some personality characteristics. To illustrate the utility of the CH-PSWQ-C in Chinese adolescent samples, we used the CH-PSWQ-C to explore the moderating effect of neuroticism on the relationship between earthquake experiences and worry; the results suggested that adolescents with high neuroticism were more vulnerable to worry after experiencing serious disasters. Keywords Worry . Penn State worry questionnaire for children . Chinese adolescents . Wenchuan earthquake
Worry is defined as apprehensive thoughts about future events with uncertain and uncontrollable outcomes (Borkovec, 1994). Such cognitive activities involve repeated rehearsal of coping strategies for possible traumatic situations and repetitive elaborations of potential negative outcomes by exaggerating their possibilities and magnitudes (Borkovec et al., 1983; Vasey et al., 1994). Individuals with high levels of worry tend to show attentional bias toward threat information, especially when such information is in verbal format (Goodwin et al., 2017; Hirsch & Mathews, 2012). Although worry is a cardinal feature for patients with generalized anxiety disorder (GAD; Chelminski & Zimmerman, 2003; Goodwin et al., 2017), it is not confined to GAD (Newman et al., 2017). Instead, worry is a normal experience for both children and adults which prepare them for potential future threats, and it is also found in other mental health conditions
* Jie Zhong [email protected] 1
Beijing Key Laboratory of Behavior and Mental Health, Clinical and Health Psychology Department, School of Psychological and Cognitive Sciences, Peking University, No. 5, Yi-He-Yuan Rd., Haidian, Beijing 100871, People’s Republic of China
(e.g., depression and other types of anxiety disorders; Caes et al., 2016). The Penn State Worry Questionnaire (PSWQ; Meyer et al., 1990), a widely used self-report measure of worry, was designed to assess the generality, excessiveness, and uncontrollability aspects of pathological worry independent of specific content. This instrument
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