Development and validation of the Parental Affection/Warmth Scale (PAWS) in a sample of parents of 2- to 8-year-olds.

Parental warmth is a treatment target of emerging interventions for children with callous-unemotional traits. However, research to date has yet to examine the empirical structure of parental warmth toward young children due to the lack of clinically feasible, psychometrically sound, and comprehensive measures of warmth for this population. To address this knowledge gap, the present study developed and tested the psychometric properties of a self-report measure of parental warmth, the Parental Affection/Warmth Scale (PAWS). A sample of 899 parents of 2- to 8-year-old children (