PAS-60 Psychological Anguish Scale: Emotional Pain Test
How the Scales are Structured
Who Usually Takes This Test?
See How You Compare
Below is a preview of how scores are typically distributed across each scale.
Example Questions From the Test
- Never
- Sometimes
- Often
- Almost always
- Never
- Sometimes
- Often
- Almost always
- Never
- Sometimes
- Often
- Almost always
PAS-60 Psychological Anguish Scale: Emotional Pain Test - Description and methodology of the test
Some weeks the hurt is loud, and some weeks it hides behind a normal face. This emotional pain test measures how much you are carrying right now and where it shows up, from a heavy chest in the morning to thoughts that loop at night. Unlike a quick mental pain quiz, it reads what you feel from several angles at once, so the result reads like your own story.
What the PAS-60 measures
The headline result is your emotional pain level from 0 to 100. It adds up five areas, each scored on its own. Intensity shows how sharp or heavy the hurt feels day to day. Spread shows how far it leaks into sleep, appetite, work and small joys. Exhaustion shows how much strength carrying it costs. Hidden pain shows how much stays behind a smile and how hard it is to put into words. Stuck thoughts show how often your mind replays conversations, old messages and the past. A sixth score, relief, stands apart and counts the people, places and activities that ease the weight. Like any careful psychological pain scale, it keeps these parts apart, so two people with the same level can end up with very different profiles.
How the scale works and how to read it
There are 60 short statements about the last two weeks, and most people finish in about eight minutes. For each one you choose Never, Sometimes, Often or Almost always. Every area also has statements worded the other way round, such as mornings that start calm and light, which keeps the score honest when you answer fast. Answer for how things have really been, not for how you think they should be. Your result includes:
- your emotional pain level from 0 to 100, from a light load to carrying a lot;
- the two areas where the pain shows up most and the lightest one;
- your relief score and what eases the weight for you;
- a comparison with other people who took the scale.
Many people are surprised that their heaviest area is not the one they expected. If you know the PAS-13, the PAS-60 is a separate scale with its own questions and six scores instead of one overall number.
- Meerwijk, E. L., & Weiss, S. J. (2011). Toward a unifying definition of psychological pain. Journal of Loss and Trauma, 16(5), 402-412.
- Tossani, E. (2013). The concept of mental pain. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 82(2), 67-73.
- Eisenberger, N. I. (2012). The pain of social disconnection: Examining the shared neural underpinnings of physical and social pain. Nature Reviews Neuroscience, 13(6), 421-434.
- Nolen-Hoeksema, S., Wisco, B. E., & Lyubomirsky, S. (2008). Rethinking rumination. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 3(5), 400-424.
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