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Depression is a main Public Health problem due to its high prevalence and to the costs for intervention and treatment. Therefore, it is necessary to identify strategies that allow an adequate assessment that would let us obtain a more precise and useful diagnosis. Nevertheless, an important obstacle for this task, is a lack of theoretical clarity in regard to diagnostic criteria or, especially, to symptoms which are relevant for depression. This fact is obvious in the scales focused on depression assessment, which have a broad variety of symptoms to assess, and it is possible to overestimate some areas or to underestimate others, related to theoretical criterions which were involved in test construction. So, depression is evaluated in accordance with the questionnaire that is used and, of course, depending of theoretical framework that supports this tool. Therefore, depression is defined in line with the criteria which evaluates it, with regard to assessment's criteria, which could explain the usual difficulty to identify common symptoms when some tools are used, which are then identified as genuine symptoms of depression. As the aim of this paper is to improve some of these limitations, the State/Trait Depression Questionnaire (ST/DEP) is showed as a useful tool for clinical and research work. It offers an assessment of one of the component of depression, the affective one, providing two measures: State and Trait. This allows to differentiate between intensity and frequency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]