Psychological Assessment Measuring Ability to Enhance and Suppress Emotional Expression: The Flexible Regulation of Emotional Expression (FREE) Scale

Flexibility in self-regulatory behaviors has proved to be an important quality for adjusting to stressful life events and requires individuals to have a diverse repertoire of emotion regulation abilities. However, the most commonly used emotion regulation questionnaires assess frequency of behavior rather than ability, with little evidence linking these measures to observable capacity to enact a behavior. The aim of the current investigation was to develop and validate a Flexible Regulation of Emotional Expression (FREE) Scale that measures a person's ability to enhance and suppress displayed emotion across an array of hypothetical contexts. In Studies 1 and 2, a series of confirmatory factor analyses revealed that the FREE Scale consists of 4 first-order factors divided by regulation and emotional valence type that can contribute to 2 higher order factors: expressive enhancement ability and suppression ability. In Study 1, we also compared the FREE Scale to other commonly used emotion regulation measures, which revealed that suppression ability is conceptually distinct from suppression frequency. In Study 3, we compared the FREE Scale with a composite of traditional frequency-based indices of expressive regulation to predict performance in a previously validated emotional modulation paradigm. Participants' enhancement and suppression ability scores on the FREE Scale predicted their corresponding performance on the laboratory task, even when controlling for baseline expressiveness. These studies suggest that the FREE Scale is a valid and flexible measure of expressive regulation ability. Expressive regulation, and in particular expressive suppression, has been associated with significant costs despite its seemingly Several models of coping and emotion regulation account for the costs and benefits of using specific behaviors, including the flexibility model, which has been increasingly implicated as an essential component of psychological health and adjustment (Aldao, Shep-pes, & Gross, 2015; Bonanno & Burton, 2013; Kashdan & Rot-tenberg, 2010). Cross-sectional studies have consistently shown greater levels of regulatory flexibility in healthy controls when compared to individuals with psychopathology (Burton et al. Models of flexibility emphasize the importance of both regulatory abilities and the context in which they are used when assessing the efficacy of a specific emotion regulation strategy. These models were partially informed by research on flexibility in expressive regulation, or expressive flexibility, which has traditionally been conducted using a behavior-based laboratory paradigm to investigate individual differences in the ability to both enhance and suppress displayed emotions. These expressive enhancement and suppression abilities have been associated with important clinical and social outcomes following …