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Socioeconomic disparities in health are prevalent and growing in importance as a concern among academics, policymakers, and the general public. However, psychological resources that can narrow such disparities have not been well-examined. The current study examined the moderating role of dispositional gratitude in the relationship between socioeconomic status (SES) and inflammation risk as an index of health. Participants consisted of 1,054 midlife adults from the biomarker project of the Midlife in the United States. Inflammation risk was measured by interleukin-6 biomarker and SES was operationalized by education attainment and income. We found that dispositional gratitude significantly moderated the relationships between SES and interleukin-6. Among individuals with low dispositional gratitude, higher SES was significantly associated with lower levels of interleukin-6. However, the association between SES and interleukin-6 was not significant among individuals with high dispositional gratitude. More importantly, the findings remained robust after controlling for demographic characteristics, health status, health behaviours, and personality traits. Our findings suggest that gratitude may serve as an important psychological resource in attenuating health-related risk from socioeconomic stressors.

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The positive affect and negative affect schedule (PANAS) is a popular measure of positive (PA) and negative affectivity (NA). Developed and validated in Western contexts, the 20-item scale has been frequently administered on respondents from Asian countries with the assumption of cross-cultural measurement invariance. We examine this assumption via a rigorous multigroup confirmatory factor analysis, which allows us to assess between-group differences in both strength of scale item-to-latent factor relationship (metric invariance test) and mean of each scale item (scalar invariance test), on a large sample of 1,065 respondents recruited from Singapore (Asian sample) and the United States (Western sample). We found that two items assessing PA ("excited" and "proud") and three items assessing NA ("guilty," "hostile," and "ashamed") exhibited metric noninvariance whereas 11 of the remaining metric invariant items exhibited scalar noninvariance, suggesting that the PA and NA constructs differ from what the PANAS is expected to measure for Asian respondents. Our findings serve as a cautionary note to researchers who intend to administer the PANAS in future studies as well as to researchers interpreting the results of past studies involving respondents from Asian countries.

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