Culture, gender, and the bipolarity of momentary affect: A critical re-examination

Abstract

This paper re-examines Yik's (2007) hypothesis that dialectic thinking moderates aggregated but not momentary ratings of affect. A reanalysis of Yik's (2007) correlation coefficients shows that culture is a significant moderator of the correlation between ratings of positive affect (PA) and negative affect (NA) for two of the three response formats, and for the latent correlations reported in the original article. The effect size of this difference is similar to the effect size in previous publications with aggregated measures of affect. It is concluded that Asian dialectic thinking styles moderate the correlation of both aggregated and momentary reports of PA and NA.

Keywords:

• Positive affecf
• Negative affect
• Bipolarity
• Independence
• Culture
• Dialectic thinking
• Ambiguous response formats