Abstract

Background. Total emotional distress scores may fail to capture differences in the balance between anxiety and depressive-anhedonic symptoms. For professions involving public evaluation and the need to mobilize resources quickly, analyzing the structure of distress may be more informative than relying on an overall score.

Objective. The goal is to compare the overall level and profile of emotional distress in performing artists, researchers, and a comparison group while accounting for sex and age.

Sample. The analysis included 299 adults from different professions: 87 performing artists, 89 researchers, and 123 participants in the comparison group; 190 women and 109 men. The mean age of the performing artists was 35.92 years (SD = 15.73), that of the researchers was 34.97 years (SD = 15.31), and that of the comparison group was 28.78 years (SD = 11.85).

Methods. Emotional distress was assessed using the Hospital Anxiety and Depression Scale (HADS; A.S. Zigmond, R.P. Snaith). Two subscales — anxiety (HADS-A) and depression (HADS-D) — along with their sum (the total HADS-T score) and a profile contrast calculated as the difference HADS-A minus HADS-D, reflecting the predominance of anxiety over depressive symptoms, were analyzed. Cronbach's α, the Kruskal — Wallis test, multivariate analysis of covariance, linear regression with robust standard errors, and comparison of screening proportions were used.

Results. Total HADS-T scores showed virtually no difference between groups: 10.09 in artists, 10.39 in researchers, and 10.08 in the comparison group; p = 0.900. The profile, however, was not uniform. After adjusting for sex and age, artists scored 2.03 points higher than the comparison group on the anxiety subscale (HADS-A) (p = 0.001) and 1.11 points lower on the depression subscale (HADS-D) (p = 0.018). The profile contrast in artists exceeded that of the comparison group by 3.14 points and that of researchers by 2.32 points (both p < 0.001). The proportion of elevated anxiety scores did not differ, whereas elevated depressive-anhedonic scores were less common among artists.

Conclusion. Comparable overall emotional distress may have a different internal structure. Artists are characterized by a relative predominance of the anxiety-mobilization component alongside less pronounced depressive-anhedonic symptoms. Thus, HADS-T should not be used without separately analyzing its subscales.