Assessment of tripartite factors of emotion in children and adolescents II: Concurrent validity of the affect and arousal scales for children

The authors assessed the reliability and validity of the Affect and Arousal Scale for Children (AFARS; Chorpita, Daleiden Moffitt, Yim, & Umemoto, 2000). The AFARS is a new measure of children's positive affect (PA), negative affect (NA), and physiological hyperarousal (PH). In the first study, 176 school children, 7 to 17 years of age, were administered measures of childhood worry, anxiety sensitivity and autonomic arousal and their parents completed a child behavior problem checklist. In a second study, two groups of 100 and 114 school children, 8 to 18 years of age, were administered measures of childhood depression and anxiety, respectively, Also, 120 of these children took part in a 1-week retest administration of the AFARS. These studies provided preliminary evidence of acceptable 1-week test-retest reliability, convergent validity, and discriminant validity for the AFARS PA, NA, and PH scales. However, the predicted pattern of convergent and discriminant relations with parent-reported criterion only emerged for children over II years of age. Further, a consistent positive relation emerged between NA and PH, yet each of these scales accounted for unique variance in the prediction of criterion measures.