Expressive flexibility and trait anxiety in India and the United States

Abstract

The present study aimed to assess the relationships between expressive flexibility, emotion regulation and trait anxiety in community samples from India and the United States. Online questionnaires were administered to 360 adults through Amazon's Mechanical Turk. We predicted (a) that being more flexible in emotional expression would be associated with lower trait anxiety and that culture would impact this relationship, (b) that cultural differences in emotion regulation and expressive flexibility would emerge, (c) that expressive flexibility would emerge as a stronger predictor of trait anxiety compared to emotion regulation, and (d) expressive flexibility would be predictive of emotion regulation. Correlations revealed that the more flexible an individual is in their emotional expression, the less trait anxiety they experience. This effect remained significant when controlling for where the participant grew up and currently resides but was reduced to nonsignificant when collectivist values were taken into account. More importantly, emotion regulation emerged as a stronger predictor of trait anxiety scores compared to expressive flexibility for both the Indian and US samples. The findings support the notion that cultural values contribute significantly to whether certain emotion regulation strategies and lower expressive flexibility lead to negative consequences in individual's lives.