The Expression Regulation Scale (ERS): Validation of Three Emotion Domains for Expressive Norms with Close and Distant Others in Private and Public Situations

Summary

This paper develops and validates the Expression Regulation Scale (ERS), a self-report measure of the social norms that guide how people modulate emotional expression. Across a wide set of 64 theory-informed emotions, the authors assessed expressive norms ranging from suppression to over-expression, crossed by context (public versus private) and interactant type (close relations versus more distant others). Using a theory-building subsample (n = 507), they applied ant colony optimization alongside a suite of factor-analytic techniques to distil the emotions into three interpretable domains, with the solution chosen so that domains could also be combined to recover a two-factor structure aligned to key theoretical frameworks. On the resulting scale, negative scores index suppression, positive scores index amplification, and scores near zero indicate little expressive regulation. The ERS provides researchers and clinicians a structured tool for measuring expressive norms across relationships and situations.