Normative data for persons over 65 on the Penn State Worry Questionnaire

Normative data are presented for the Penn State Worry Questionnaire (PSWQ) from 255 healthy New Zealanders over the age of 65. The PSWQ was administered during the course of a two-year trial of the effect on cognition and mood of lowering homocysteine levels using vitamin and folate supplements. The scale proved to have good internal consistency, and there were no significant effects of sex, age, or premorbid IQ on the PSWQ scores. Mean scores and percentiles are presented for both the abbreviated an 8-item short-form (PSWQ-A) developed for use with the elderly by Hopko et al. (2003) and for the total score. Confirmatory factor analyses were conducted and provided evidence for the construct validity of both the short-form and the total scale score as single-factor measures of worry. The results of this study, taken together with findings from other studies in the literature suggest that a score on the PSWQ above 50 from a client above the age of 65 is suggestive of a need to assess further for generalised anxiety disorder. ********** The Penn State Worry Questionnaire (PSWQ) was developed by Meyer, Miller, Metzger, and Borkovec (1990) as a means of measuring the propensity to worry excessively, the core symptom of generalised anxiety disorder (GAD). Worry is a significant cognitive component of anxiety and as such is a frequent target for change in many cognitive therapies (e.g., Wells, 1995; 2005). The defining characteristic of worry is the presence of thoughts indicating a heightened anticipation of future personal or emotional threat, accompanied by an inability to resolve or exclude these cognitions (Borkovec, Shadick, & Hopkins, 1991; Matthews, 1990; Rapee, 1991). Although worrying is often considered to have the adaptive function of preparing for possible danger, when this thinking does not lead to a useful outcome or begins to involve scenarios which are unlikely to arise, worrying can be seen as pathological. Persons with GAD are assumed to be excessively sensitive to cues indicative of threat, or to have a maladaptive emotional or cognitive response to threat cues (Mathews, 1990). The PSWQ is a 16-item measure with a 5-point response scale ranging from 1 (not all like me) to 5 (very typical of me) and a maximum score of 80, widely used in clinical psychology practice. Eleven of the items are positive for the presence of worry ("Once I start worrying I cannot stop") and five, which are reverse scored, have content indicating an absence of worry ("I never worry about anything"). The psychometric characteristics of the PSWQ have been investigated in a number of studies and generally found to be satisfactory. In the series of eight studies in which the initial test construction process was described (Meyer et al., 1990), good evidence for the internal consistency (alpha > .90), retest stability (r > .74 over two to four weeks), and discriminative validity of the scale was presented. In subsequent studies, the internal consistency of the scales has been consistently found to be excellent, with estimates ranging from . 80 to . 95 (Brown, Antony, & Barlow, 1992; Crittendon & Hopko, 2006; Fresco, Mennin, Heimberg, & Turk, 2002; Stanley, Novy, Bourland, Beck, & Averill, 2001; Wetherell, Gatz, & Craske, 2003). Retest reliability has been found to be acceptable for younger college samples but more modest (r = .54) for older adults (Stanley et al., 2001). The convergent validity of the scale has been demonstrated in several studies (e.g., Brown et al. 1992; Davey, 1993; Stanley et al. 2001; Wetherell et al., 2003). In their study of 436 persons with anxiety disorders (including 50 persons with GAD), Brown et al. (1992) found that the PSWQ had good concurrent validity and was able to distinguish GAD from other anxiety disorders. For most research and clinical purposes, the sum of the scores on all 16 items is usually calculated and the scale treated as unidimensional. …