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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article
Front. Psychol.
Sec. Cultural Psychology
Volume 16 - 2025 | doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2025.1535224
Comorbidity of Depression and Test Anxiety among Vietnamese and Chinese Undergraduates: Cross-Cultural Insights from Latent Profile and Network Analyses
Provisionally accepted- Nanjing University, Nanjing, China
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The comorbidity of test anxiety and depression among Chinese students has been identified in many previous studies. However, despite the high prevalence of test anxiety in Vietnam, no relevant studies currently exist. This study tested measurement invariance, assessed test information, and examined symptom interrelations among 844 Vietnamese and Chinese undergraduates using multi-group latent profile analysis (MLPA) and network analysis. Participants completed the Test Anxiety Inventory (TAI) and the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II) in either Vietnamese or Chinese. The results revealed that: (1) Both Chinese and Vietnamese students experience comorbidity of test anxiety and depression, but Chinese students with high test anxiety show a greater risk of depressive tendencies; (2) The core symptoms of the test anxietydepression comorbidity differ between the two student groups; (3) While the network structures of the high-test-anxiety-high-depression group exhibit some similarities across cultures, significant differences emerge in the low-to-moderate test anxiety and moderate depression groups. These findings highlight cultural differences in the recognition and expression of test anxiety and depression among undergraduates from Vietnam and China, suggesting the importance of considering cultural contexts in crosscultural mental health research and interventions.
Keywords: test anxiety, Depression, China-Vietnam Cross-Cultural Study, Multigroup Latent Profile Analysis, Network analysis
Received: 29 Nov 2024; Accepted: 09 Apr 2025.
Copyright: © 2025 Quach and Zhou. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY). The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) or licensor are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.
* Correspondence: Renlai Zhou, Nanjing University, Nanjing, China
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