A cross-cultural validation of the implicit positive and negative affect test (IPANAT): Results from ten countries across three continents

Self-report measures of affect come with a number of difficulties that can be circumvented by using indirect measurement procedures. The Implicit Positive and Negative Affect Test (IPANAT) is a recently developed measure of automatic activation of representations of affective states and traits that draws on participants' ratings of the extent to which nonsense words purportedly originating from an artificial language bear positive or negative meaning. Here we compared psychometric properties of this procedure across 10 countries and provide versions in corresponding languages (Chinese, Dutch, English, French, German, Italian, Polish, Russian, and Spanish). The results suggest good reliability, metric invariance, and construct validity across countries and languages. The IPANAT thus turns out as a useful tool for the indirect assessment of affect in different languages and cultures.