With Institutional Review Board approval from the four participating medical centers, the subset of STAI data used in this investigation was taken from data for a larger longitudinal multimethod (qualitative and quantitative) study designed to examine the effects of neonatal screening and subsequent diagnosis on the parent-infant relationship and the potential mechanisms that may contribute to the quality of this relationship. Based upon theories of attachment (Belsky, 2005 ; Bowlby, 1973 ) and emotion regulation (Gross, 1999 ; Richards & Gross, 2000 (link)), parental anxiety was proposed to be one of the mediating variables related to the quality of interactions between parents and their infants. Given that the Marteau and Bekker (1992) instrument was validated with a sample that included a group of pregnant women, it was hypothesized that the Marteau and Bekker (1992) measure of state anxiety as a cognitive, future oriented, and global phenomenon would be a more salient, and therefore, more sensitive to state anxiety in parents of young infants than the Chlan et al. (2003) (link) instrument.