Culture and the Structure of Affect: A Bifactor Modeling Approach

This paper tested the impact of culture on the basic structure of affect. It examined positive affect and negative affect at three levels of activation in the U.S. and China. It used a well-suited tool, the bifactor model, to separate the common variance shared by all types of affect from the variance unique to each. The findings indicate that the structure of affect is different cross-culturally. In the U.S., the most fundamental dimension is defined by moderate activation of positive affect and negative affect, which is the largely bipolar dimension of pleasure-displeasure, whereas in China, it is defined by moderate activation of positive affect only, which is pleasure. In both cultures, negative affect across levels of activation forms another important dimension. Beyond these basic dimensions, secondary dimensions are also identified in both cultures: high activation positive affect, low activation positive affect, and low activation negative affect. They form relatively weak unique factors, independent of the two basic dimensions, suggesting that they are largely mixtures of the basic dimensions.