Published in the research literature as Negative Expressivity.
What do you do with anger, fear, and sadness?
How much of your anger, fear, and sadness other people get to see.
Negative Expressivity is about what happens to anger, fear and sadness on the way out. Whether they reach the surface, and how much of them arrives there.
Nothing here is about how much somebody feels. The difficult feelings are assumed; the question is what becomes visible, and to whom, and how quickly.
It is the scale with the widest gap between how it looks and what is going on. Somebody who shows very little can be having a terrible week that nobody in the office has noticed, and somebody who shows a great deal may have recovered by lunch.
Both ends do real work in a relationship, in opposite directions. One asks people to ask; the other tells them without being asked. Neither is easier to be close to, and the pairings that work usually work because both parties know which they are dealing with.
It also shifts with the room. Somebody guarded at work can be entirely open at home, and the version colleagues have met may bear very little relation to the one their family knows.
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Start your free assessmentEvery one of the seven runs between two named ends, and neither end is the one to aim for. Each buys something and each costs something, which is why both of them have a name here.
The difficult feelings stay in. Somebody at this end handles a hard thing privately and mentions it, if at all, once it is over and can be described calmly. What it buys is that they are steady to be around and rarely make a bad situation heavier for everybody else. What it costs is that the people closest to them find out late, and can feel shut out by something that was never aimed at them.
What is felt tends to show. Somebody at this end lets frustration into their voice, cries when they are sad, and is generally readable within about a minute of walking through a door. What it buys is that nothing has to be guessed and very little gets stored up. What it costs is that a passing mood can land on other people with more force than it deserved.
The middle usually means it depends on the feeling and the room. Frustration might show while worry does not, or the whole of it might arrive at home hours after it was held down at work. That is common and it is not indecision about anything.
A result names one of five positions along this scale. They run from one end to the other, and no figure sits beside them: there is no reference sample for these scales, so nothing here can say how many people land where.
The guarded end gets read as not feeling much, and the open end gets read as drama. Both misses are the same mistake, which is treating a display as a measurement of what is underneath it. There is no reliable way to read the size of a feeling off the outside of a person.
The two expressivity scales run separately, and a person can sit at opposite ends of them. Negative Expressivity is about anger, fear and sadness; Positive Expressivity is about happiness and affection.
Both concern somebody's own feelings. Attending to Emotions is about whether they notice what they are feeling; Negative Expressivity is about whether anybody else finds out.
A scale describes a tendency, not an ability. There is no good end of any of the seven, and where somebody sits says nothing about how well they handle what they feel.
It also says nothing about where they stand next to anybody. No reference sample exists for these scales, so a result describes how one person answered and stops there.
Or start with what emotional intelligence means.
Sixty-eight questions, about eight minutes. You get a plain read on all seven scales, free, with both ends of every one of them named rather than scored.
68 questions · about 8 min · free
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