Development and Validation of the Multidimensional Sense of Self Scale

It has been suggested that the experience of the self may be altered in depression. However, most research in this area focuses on the negative content of depressed individuals’ self-image. We developed the Multidimensional Sense of Self (MSoS) scale to enable the examination of dissociable, valence-independent aspects of the self which have not been widely investigated in depression. The structure and content validity of the scale were examined in 306 participants. The final MSoS scale consists of 18 items which load onto three factors: psychological sense of self (self-knowledge), self-focused emotional processing, and sense of self-continuity. For these subscales, strong inter-item correlations, internal consistency, test-retest reliability, and convergent validity with depressions cores were observed. This provides preliminary support for the MSoS scale as a useful tool to examine the sense of self in psychiatric disorders, such as depression.