Individuals' physiological response to anxiety and stress can be debilitating, both emotionally and physically. Tools and techniques that can help in identifying maladaptive physiological responses to stress and anxiety in children can provide the early identification and treatment needed to obviate later psychological or medical pathology. Factor analytic studies of the Revised Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale-RCMAS (Reynolds & Richmond, 1978) have identified a factor which was subsequently named the “physiological” subscale (Reynolds & Paget, 1981). However, the degree to which this subscale measures physiological concomitants of anxiety has not been ascertained. The present study evaluated the concurrent validity of this subscale through a multitrait, multimethod analysis (Campbell, 1960; Campbell & Fiske, 1959) of behavioral ratings of anxiety/somatic complaints, depression and aggression as rated by the parents and teachers for each of the eighty males involved in the study. The results indicated a lack of both convergent and discriminant validity for the RCMAS Physiological subscale. An over-whelming degree of method variance was observed in the behavioral ratings.
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