Studies in the relationship between depressive disorders and anxiety states. Part 2. Clinical items.

A principal component analysis of the clinical items recorded on a standard proforma for 108 patients suffering from anxiety, depressive and phobic neurosis yielded 2 clinically important components. There was considerable overlap between diagnostic groups when patients' component scores were plotted but the degree of misclassification was reduced to about 18% following discriminant function analysis. For the first component the most important discriminators with depressive weighting were depressed mood and pessimistic outlook, whereas reactivity of depression and increased physiological responses carried anxiety weighting. In the second component depressed mood and pessimistic outlook were the highest depressive discriminators and highest positive anxiety ones were increased physiological responses, situational phobias and compulsive phenomena.