Abstract

The difficulties inherent in obtaining con-sistent and adequate diagnoses for the pur-poses of research and therapy have been pointed out by a number of authors. Pasamanick12 in a recent article viewed the low interclinician agreement on diagnosis as an indictment of the present state of psychiatry and called for "the development of objective, measurable and verifiable criteria of classification based not on per-sonal or parochial considerations, but- on behavioral and other objectively measurable manifestations." Attempts by other investigators to subject clinical observations and judgments to ob-jective measurement have resulted in a wide variety of psychiatric rating ~ c a l e s. ~ J ~ These have been well summarized in a re-view article by Lorr l1 on "Rating Scales and Check Lists for the E v a 1 u a t i o n of Psychopathology. " In the area of psy-chological testing, a variety of paper-and-pencil tests have been devised for the purpose of measuring specific personality traits; for example, the Depression-Elation Test, de-vised by Jasper in 1930. This report describes the development of an instrument designed to measure the behavioral manifestations of depression. In the planning of the research design of a project aimed at testing certain psychoanalyt-ic formulations of depression, the necessity for establishing an appropriate system for identifying depression was recognized. Be-cause of the reports on the low degree of interclinician agreement on diagnosis,13 we could not depend on the clinical diagnosis, but had to formulate a method of defining depression that would be reliable and valid. The available instruments were not con-sidered adequate for our purposes. The Min-nesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory, for example, was not specifically designed Submitted for publication Nov. 29, 1960. This investigation was supported by Research