Examining the cross‐cultural validity of the positive affect and negative affect schedule between an Asian (Singaporean) sample and a Western (American) sample

Abstract

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.

Prospering in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic: The effects of PROSPER-based intervention on psychological outcomes among preschool teachers

“…The PANAS has been adapted to measure individuals' affect in the Chinese community ( Huang et al, 2003 ; Thompson, 2007 ). The cross-cultural validity of the scale was established between Chinese and western populations ( Lee, Hartanto, et al, 2020 ). In the present study, the Cronbach's alpha coefficients of this scale at baseline and pos t -test were 0.85 and 0.89, respectively.…”

Positive Emotions as a Potential Mediator of a Multi-Component Positive Psychology Intervention Aimed at Increasing Mental Well-Being and Resilience

“…The PANAS appears to have adequate psychometric properties (Crawford and Henry 2004). It is used widely across the globe and studies show that the questionnaire is non-invariant between respondents from a collectivistic cultural context (non-western countries) and those from individualistic cultural context (western countries) (Weidong et al 2004;Lee et al 2020). We used the Dutch version of the PANAS, for which the psychometric properties also appear to be solid (Engelen et al 2006).…”

Effect of obligation to help on positive affect: Comparing Japan, Romania, and the United States

“…In addition, because this study mainly used Likert‐type scales, which are susceptible to response bias and might not measure the same construct in different cultures, results should be interpreted with caution. For example, affect was measured with PANAS, which has been shown to not be invariant across cultures (Lee et al, 2020). Considering that results concerning different emotions were inconsistent (e.g., the interaction between culture and obligation was significant when predicting positive affect, but became marginally significant in the case of happiness, and nonsignificant in the case of negative affect), more objective measurement of emotion is required.…”

“…In addition, because this study mainly used Likert-type scales, which are susceptible to response bias and might not measure the same construct in different cultures, results should be interpreted with caution. For example, affect was measured with PANAS, which has been shown to not be invariant across cultures (Lee et al, 2020).…”