[1] The TMAS originally consisted of 50 true or false questions a person answers by reflecting on themselves, in order to determine their anxiety level.
O’Connor, Lorr, and Stafford found there were five general factors in the scale: chronic anxiety or worry, increased physiological reactivity, sleep disturbances associated with inner strain, sense of personal inadequacy, and motor tension.
Kitano tested the validity of the CMAS by comparing students who were placed in special education classes versus those placed in regular classrooms.
Kitano proposed the idea that children who were in special education classes were more likely to have higher anxiety than those in regular classrooms.
Using the CMAS, Kitano found boys tested in the special education classes had higher anxiety scores than their regular classroom counterparts.
[7] Although the CMAS proved to not have a feminine bias, Quarter and Laxer found that females tend to score higher on the TMAS than their male counterparts.
[10] Hafner, however, found that the CMAS does not reflect the gender difference as the girls that took the children's test only scored higher than the boys consistently on two of the questions.
This study found that the TMAS is sensitive to certain cross-cultural differences, but precautions should be taken when interpreting scores from the scale in non-Western cultures, regardless of the individual's education level.
For example, the AMAS-C has items pertaining specifically to college students, such as questions about anxiety of the future.
The AMAS-A is geared more toward mid-life issues, and the AMAS-E has specific anxieties the older population deals with, such as fear of aging and dying.
Twenty-three of the questions on the AMAS-E are related to worry/oversensitivity, but The Fear of Aging category of this scale includes items such as "I worry about becoming senile".
[13] Similar to the TMAS, the AMAS can be given in a group or individual setting, and the person responds either yes or no to each item listed according to if it pertains to themselves or not.
The AMAS can be used in clinical settings, career counseling centers on campuses, hospices, nursing homes, and to monitor the progress and effectiveness of psychotherapy and drug treatment.
[15] The TMAS scale was frequently used in the past; however, its use has declined over the years due to problems with the validity of this self-report measure.
Participants use their own judgement when answering questions, which causes internal and construct validity issues, which makes the interpretation of results difficult.