What do you know about the Beck Anxiety Inventory?

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What do you know about the Beck Anxiety Inventory?

Saturday, October 10th, 2009 Subscribe To Our Feed

The Beck Anxiety Inventory measures the severity of anxiety. It was brought to life by the very famous Aaron Temkin Beck, an American professor who has extensively focused on psychopathology, psychotherapy, suicide and psychotics. Using these studies as starting point he developed cognitive therapy, a foundation for Beck Anxiety Inventory and Beck Depression Inventory, and interestingly enough this is the instrument of choice for calculating depression severity.

The Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI), is made of of 21 multiple choice questions. A particular kind of psychological test used by mental health professionals is a self-reporting inventory, whereby patients can not get help during filling out the questionnaire or test. The questionnaire includes questions on the patients’ behaviour, symptoms and anything that might give an indication in their personality traits that they have a mental disorder or illness. Once the answers are given by the patient on the self-report inventory, they are then used on the Beck Anxiety inventory to determine the scale.

The Beck Anxiety Inventory test has 21 questions and its total score is 63. The patient has to answer to various questions including how they’ve been feeling during the past week related to anxiety symptoms such as cold, hot sweats, numbness, feeling of fear and apprehesion, etc. The choice of answers is always the same for all the questions, but the actual questions might be different. Depending on how they felt, the patient will choose the best answer. The patients can go with a range of 4 answers: “not at all”, “mildly”, “moderately” to “severely”, based on how much they were bothered when reading the question.

Each symptom that the patient experiences is rated on a 4-point scale with a range from 0 to 3 and the ratings sum is counted towards the grand score. A patient can have a highest score of 63. The Beck Computer Scoring scores and interprets the Beck Anxiety Inventory. Both adults and adolescents use the BAI, as it is a very accurate assessor of symptoms of panic. Even though the test has been used on adults, teenagers and older people, women do score more points than men on these tests. Counting as one of the top 3 tools of its kind, The Beck Anxiety Inventory is a common tool that determines and measures anxiety accurately.

The scores indicated the following about the patients.

0-7 indicates a minimal level of anxiety.
8-15 indicates a mild level of anxiety.
16-25: Moderate level of anxiety.
26-63 indicates a severe anxiety level.

In order to determine which anxiety and depression symptoms are anxiety related, the health care professionals use Beck Anxiety Inventory. When the Beck Anxiety Inventory is orally administered, by the means of an interview, it only takes around 10 minutes, and if it’s self-administered it takes even less than that. It works the best if it’s used in clinical settings or in research.

Are you interested in learning the signs and symptoms of panic attacks, how to control panic attacks or how to use the zung self rating scale? Go to our site to learn these answers, plus much more.

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