Cross-Cultural Differences on Affective, Cognitive, and Psychiatric Measures: Evidence From a British-Chinese Comparison

Abstract

Individuals worldwide share basic affective and cognitive abilities, and receive mental health diagnoses using similar scales. However, these measures have been predominantly developed and validated in Western contexts. Here, we compared British (N = 187; age 19–73 years) and Chinese participants (N = 194; age 19–60 years) on behavioral tasks of facial emotion recognition and sustained attention, evaluating affect and cognition, as well as mental health measures of anxiety, depression, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and impulsivity. Comparing British and Chinese populations is particularly important as they represent distinct cultural traditions in emotional expression, cognitive processing, and mental health conceptualization. We found that British participants were significantly better at recognizing emotions, especially negative ones; while Chinese participants showed higher obsessive-compulsive symptoms, driven primarily by the number-meaning item, the tendency to assign significance to numerical information. The groups showed negligible differences in sustained attention and other mental health measures. This study provides novel evidence that culture has a greater influence on affective abilities than cognitive ones, and highlights concerns about cultural biases in established mental health scales. However, these findings may not generalize beyond British and Chinese populations, which calls for broader cross-cultural research.