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n a 1996 paper in the Journal of Clinical Psychology, our lead author introduced "severeweather phobia" as a term, defining this condition as "an intense, debilitating, unreasonable fear of severe weather." The term "severe weather" was defined as severe thunderstorms or tornadoes. The exploratory study in 1996 of severe-weather phobia based its findings on interviews with 81 people who described themselves as severe-weather phobics. Sixty-five of the 81 subjects (80%) indicated that the onset of their phobia occurred as a result of a previous encounter with a severe storm (using the National Weather Service definition: winds at 58 mph or greater, or 0.75-inch or larger hail, or tornadoes). Phobics monitored the weather radio almost constantly and had anxiety even if the threat of severe weather was five days away or more; and they often thought about being injured or dying. The anxiety ceased as soon as the threat of severe weather was over. The subjects were embarrassed or very embarrassed about their phobia and were surprised to learn that others might also have the phobia. However, very few subjects had sought treatment of any kind. It is important to emphasize that these phobics were very afraid of severe weather. Many of them described themselves as barely able or unable to function prior to and during severe-weather events. Subjects described moving to other parts of the country and not picking up their children at school as two

This study developed and validated a Mathematics Anxiety Scale for Students (MASS) that can be used to measure the level of mathematics anxiety that students experience in school settings and help them overcome anxiety and perform better in mathematics achievement. We conducted a series of preliminary analyses and panel reviews to evaluate quality of items initially developed for the MASS. The 65 items that measure four domains of mathematics anxiety (nature of mathematics, learning strategy, test/performance, and environment) were finally selected to constitute the final version of the MASS and were administered to a nationally representative sample of 2,339 Korean middle school and high school students to validate the scale. Psychometric properties including descriptive statistics, reliability measures, factorial structure, and correlations with external criteria were examined to provide validity evidences of the final scale. This study contains a detailed description of the entire process of developing and validating the MASS, including the itemselection procedures and psychometric properties of the scale. We believe that the MASS, developed in this study, provides basic but very essential information for predicting specific factors that can cause such anxiety among students.

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