Background
The Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS) [
1] is a self-report screening instrument for negative moods. The HADS was developed to identify people with physical illness who present anxiety and depressive disorders. To discern somatic symptoms of anxiety and depression from those caused by physical illness, the HADS taps only the affective and cognitive aspects of anxiety and depression. The HADS consists of 14 items; the anxiety (HADS-A) and depression (HADS-D) subscales each include 7 items. The conciseness of the HADS allows a high degree of usability in both clinical and research settings.
The reliability and validity of the HADS has been well established [
2,
3]. However, previous studies have reported inconsistent factor structures. Earlier studies, which used exploratory factor analyses, have demonstrated single- [
4], two- [
5‐
12], three- [
13‐
16], and four- [
17] factor structures. Moreover, recent studies using confirmatory factor analyses have reported three-factor structures. The third factor involved "restlessness" [
18], "psychomotor agitation" [
19,
20], or "negative affectivity" [
21‐
24]. However, most of these factors were highly correlated to anxiety and depression factors. These high correlations suggest that these constructs are essentially identical [
18]. Hence, the three-factor models of the HADS may need empirically and theoretically cautious interpretations.
The HADS was originally developed as a tool to be used for a cancer patient sample. In psychiatric research setting several studies reported that depressive symptoms in psychiatric and non-psychiatric samples are of the same quality in terms of the components, and the difference between the two groups is found in terms of illness severity [
25]. It remains unclear whether this is true for the HADS. Therefore it is of clinical as well as research importance to confirm if the factor structure of the HADS is the same across psychiatric and non-psychiatric populations.
A third question is the cultural difference of the HADS factor structure. Because most of the past investigations of the HADS factor structure are from the Western countries and it is known that psychological phenomena may vary from one culture to another [
26], it is important to examine the HADS factor structure in a non-western culture. To our knowledge, the validity study of the Japanese version of the HADS has yet to be reported.
The main objective of this study is to examine the factor structure of the Japanese version of the HADS in psychiatric outpatient and student populations.
Discussion
The aim of the present study is to examine the factor structure of the HADS using Japanese psychiatric outpatient and student populations. We demonstrated that the HADS consists of two factors, which represent anxiety and depression with moderate correlations. The factor structure refined by exploratory factor analysis includes the error variance due to measurement error and a random component in the measured phenomenon. In contrast, confirmatory factor analysis allows the error variables independent from the observed variables. Thus, the factor structure examined by the confirmatory factor analysis stringently excludes the influence of error variance. When both methodologies support a two-factor structure, the model shown in the exploratory factor analysis provides a stronger validity than the result from the confirmatory factor analysis because the two-factor structure is thoroughly robust despite the errors. Thus, the result in this study is consistent with earlier exploratory studies [
5‐
12].
The two-factor structure in this study is empirically derived. The anxiety and depressive symptoms observed in psychiatric evaluation entail both state and trait aspects. The trait aspects are partly composed of negative affective personality. For example, anxiety, depression, and neuroticism are partly explained by a common genetic factor [
37,
38]. These reports appear to explain the facts that the two distinct symptoms are frequently comorbid. Neuroticism accounts for the comorbidity between anxiety and depressive disorders [
39]. This type of personality, especially negative affective temperament, can be considered either as a personality trait or as a trait aspect of anxiety and/or depressive symptoms [
40]. The tripartite model [
41] assumes that the negative affectivity shared by anxiety and depression involves a trait-like construct, including neuroticism. This is theoretically sophisticated. However, when empirical data show high correlations between negative affectivity and anxiety or depression, the constructs of negative affectivity should be reduced to anxiety or depressive symptoms. Barbee [
42] noted that symptom-based diagnoses are the best alternative when the aetiology of anxiety and depressive disorders is not substantially determined. Thus, the HADS tapping anxiety and depression symptoms are reasonable in terms of factor structure.
The model in this study is consistent for all the subgroups. As expected, the factor pattern of the HADS in this study is same across the outpatient and student groups. The major difference between the two groups is the severity of anxiety and depression. In addition, this model completely coincides between men and women. Several differences between the outpatient and student samples were observed in the factor loadings. In this study, half the factor loadings of the anxiety items could be constrained, suggesting that a certain part of psychic anxiety is invariant across the outpatient and student samples. One possible explanation is that the HADS excludes somatic symptoms. General Anxiety Disorder often accompanies anxiety or panic attacks presented as dyspnea, tachysystole, and sweating [
43]. These somatic symptoms of anxiety may be a clear difference between the outpatient and student samples. The other possibility is that most outpatients in this study are in the chronic phase and their anxiety symptoms had been vastly improved through long-term treatment. Although the mean scores of HADS-A were significantly higher in the outpatients, the factor loadings of mild anxiety may be more similar to those of the students.
In contrast, few factor loadings of the depression items could be constrained. The difference between the outpatient and student groups is particularly obvious in the items that are assumed to reflect anhedonics. This result suggests that the effect of the depression construct on each item is different between the two groups. One plausible explanation is that the HADS-D focuses on anhedonic symptoms. Anhedonics are the core symptoms of Major Depressive Disorder [
44]. The difference in factor loadings of the depression items may partly depend on the severity of depression. Thus, the HADS-D may be more reliable in a psychiatric sample compared to a non-psychiatric sample.
This study was conducted on the outpatient and student samples. It remains possible that different structures exist for different target populations. Factor analytic studies frequently reported that the constructs can vary in different subgroups of the sample [
45‐
47]. When people with physical illness were included in our sample, the construct may vary. For instance, people with cancer mostly suffer pain, fatigue, and insomnia [
48,
49]. Previous studies indicated that cancer-related pain was linked to anxiety relative to depression [
50‐
52], and that cancer-related fatigue/insomnia deteriorated depression [
53]. The influence of such physical symptoms on the factor structure of the HADS has not been substantially identified. Further investigation is required.
Several items need to be carefully examined. In our two-factor model, items 6 and 7 each indicated dual loadings for anxiety and depression factors. Among previous studies, which have reported two-factor solutions, item 7 ("I can sit at ease and feel relaxed") have shown high factor loadings for either the anxiety [
1] or depression factor [
8]. This discrepancy may stem from the ambiguous wording. Item 7 simultaneously refers to psychomotor agitation ("cannot sit at ease") and inner tension or anhedonia ("cannot feel relaxed"), which may cause the dual loading in this study. To clarify the target construct, this double-barrel question should be divided into two sentences in future revisions [
54]. Item 6 also indicates dual loading. This finding may be specific to the Japanese population. Previous studies have consistently reported that item 6 constitutes a depression factor with moderate loading [
1,
8,
13,
18,
22]. Although the language equivalence of the Japanese version of HADS is well established [
27], the response bias changes the basic nature of the depression item to an anxiety item. The item 6 ("I feel cheerful") when translated into Japanese connotes the shift of the mood from its cheerful comfortable state. It may suggest, to some extent, irritability and feeling upset in addition to despondency. This may cause a response option with negative expression. Further studies on the response bias of the Japanese version of the HADS are needed.
In addition, item 10 needs to be more closely examined in order to determine the consistency with the other depression items. Item 10 in this study had low contributions in both the exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses. This is congruent with the previous studies [
18]. The item asking personal appearance may be influenced by a construct other than depression, such as interpersonal attraction and/or social desirability. Thus, further investigation is necessary to identify the confounding factors of item 10.
Despite these minor shortages, the scoring system of the HADS should adhere to the original instructions by Zigmond and Snaith [
1]; the HADS-A and HADS-D subscales should each be comprised of the original seven items. The confirmatory factor analyses in this study suggest that all items show a substantial contribution to the fitness of the current model. Although the item 6 showed higher loadings on the anxiety factor and the item 7 indicated higher loading on the depression factor, these inappropriate loadings appear to be stemmed partly from the wording issues previously mentioned. The revision of the HADS should be started from such language issues in advance of the rescoring. In the original scoring system, however, the two of the depression items (item 6 and 10) may undermine a precise evaluation of depressive level as suggested by the low contributions to the depression factor. Indeed the Cronbach's alpha coefficient of the HADS-D was lower than that of the HADS-A in this study. Therefore, it should be noted that the validity and reliability of the HADS-D subscale is inferior to the HADS-A subscale in the current Japanese version of the HADS.
This study has some limitations. First, our sample does not include people with bodily diseases. The HADS was originally developed to detect anxiety and depression in a hospital setting [
1]. The influence of somatic symptoms on the factor structure of the HADS is still unclear. Further research that compares different types of medically ill patients should determine the usability of the HADS. Second, the low response rate in the outpatient group may involve a response bias for the questionnaire. Non-respondents may partly include outpatients in an acute phase of psychiatric illness, while most of the respondents were in a chronic phase. Thus, the findings in this study should be confined to relatively improved symptoms of anxiety and depression in the outpatients. Third, this study collected cross-sectional HADS data. Thus, the factor stability over time remains unclear. Previous studies have reported that early onset of anxiety disorders is linked to subsequent depression [
55,
56]. These changes in the symptoms during a clinical course may influence factorial validity. A longitudinal research study would allow the temporal stability of the HADS to be examined. Finally, the construct overlap between the HADS and the other assessment instruments was not examined. The HADS emphasizes psychic symptoms of autonomic anxiety and anhedonic depression, while other scales (e.g., Beck Depression Inventory [
57] and State-Trait Anxiety Inventory [
58]) tap broader components such as helplessness and somatic symptoms of anxiety and depression. The convergent validity of the HADS should be confirmed in relation to the other anxiety and depression scales. Joint factor analysis may provide evidence of item overlap in broader constructs of anxiety and depression across instruments.
Competing interests
The authors declare that they have no competing interests.
Authors' contributions
TM and TK planned the study. HK and RK collected data from student populations. HM and KO collected data from a clinical population. HI gave advices and comments from a clinical perspective. TM wrote the manuscript.