The Profile of Mood States (POMS) was first published in 1971 and was originally designed for measuring “current” mood states in people undergoing counseling or psychotherapy. Later, it has been widely used to assess distinct mood states in both medical patients and normal population in general. The POMS consists of a list of 65 items that describe moods or feelings, to which the participants respond on a 5-point Likert scale that ranges from 0 (not at all) to 4 (extremely). Basically, the POMS measures six identifiable mood states: Tension-Anxiety (T), Depression-Dejection (D), Anger-Hostility (A), Vigor-Activity (V), Fatigue-Inertia (F), and Confusion-Bewilderment (C). An additional unscored dimension, Friendliness (Fr), is also included in the POMS. The administration time of the POMS was approximately 5 minutes for a healthy individual. However, physically ill or otherwise compromised individuals may take up to 20 minutes to complete the POMS. This imposes an undue burden on those patients or participants. The purpose of this study was to develop a short and yet reliable version of the POMS (POMS-SV). The bilingual version (English and Chinese) of the POMS was administered to participants (N=2,010) from Hong Kong and Beijing. Using the Reliability Analysis procedure from the SPSS (Version 10.1), Cronbach alpha of the items were determined. Item deletion from the POMS was based on the effect of the items on subscale internal consistency and face validity. As a result, the final version of the POMS-SV had 38 items. Cronbach aphla of the T (5 items), D (9 items), A (9 items), V (5 items), F (5 items), and C (5 items) dimensions of the POMS-SV were .84, .90, .89, .86, .87, .80, respectively. Zero-order correlation between the POMS-SV and the POMS for the six dimensions demonstrated a very strong positive relationship (i.e., ranged from r=.94 to r=.97). The overall internal consistency of the POMS-SV (i.e., .86) was slightly better than the original POMS (i.e., .84). In conclusion, the POMS-SV retained the psychometric properties of the original POMS and yet it reduced greatly (over 40%) the response burden necessary for completion. Moreover, the large sample size used to develop the POMS-SV enhanced the reliability and generalizability of the scale. Since the POMS-SV was developed using a normal population, future studies may include patients and athletes to determine its stability.