How Much Do Your Emotions Show?
The gap between what you feel and what shows on your face
Two people can feel exactly the same flash of anger and look completely different doing it - one visibly seething, the other giving away nothing. Expressivity research treats this as a trait with its own shape: how strongly emotion builds inside you before it even reaches your face, and, separately, how much of it you let show once it is there, split by whether the feeling is pleasant or not. None of this says how well you cope with what you feel - a very expressive person and a very contained one can be equally in control, or equally overwhelmed.
Before you start There are no right answers. Pick what is usually true for you, not what sounds best.
Answer about how you generally come across, not about your one best poker-face moment.
What it measures
Three facets of the Berkeley Expressivity Questionnaire: positive expressivity (how visibly you show joy, warmth, enthusiasm), negative expressivity (how visibly you show anger, sadness, frustration) and impulse strength (how intensely emotion builds inside you, whatever you then do with it). This differs from the site's emotion-regulation test, which is about the strategies you use to manage a feeling - reframing a situation or holding it in. Expressivity is about the visible output regardless of strategy: someone can suppress heavily and still leak plenty of expression, or regulate calmly and simply not be a very outward person to begin with.
Based on: Berkeley Expressivity Questionnaire (Gross & John, 1995, 1997)
Possible results
Positive expressivity
How visibly you show joy, warmth and enthusiasm.
Negative expressivity
How visibly you show anger, sadness or frustration.
Impulse strength
How intensely emotion builds inside you before you do anything about it.
Common questions
Is being expressive the same as being emotional?
No. This measures how much shows on the outside, not how much you feel. Impulse strength is closer to intensity - and even that is separate from expressivity, since two people can feel an equally strong impulse and only one of them shows it.
Is low expressivity a sign of suppression?
Not necessarily. Suppression is an active strategy for holding a feeling in; low expressivity can simply be a quieter baseline that takes no active effort at all. The two often go together but they are not the same measurement.
Can expressivity change?
Some, more through habit and context than direct effort - people become more expressive around family than at work, for instance. The trait describes a typical range, not a fixed number.
Is it better to be more or less expressive?
Neither end is inherently better - it depends what a situation needs. Visible warmth builds connection fast; a quieter style can protect privacy and steadiness under pressure. What differs between people is which situations their style serves well, not which style is correct.
Sources
- Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (1995). Facets of emotional expressivity: Three self-report factors and their correlates. Personality and Individual Differences. doi:10.1016/0191-8869(95)00055-b
- Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (1997). Revealing feelings: Facets of emotional expressivity in self-reports, peer ratings, and behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. doi:10.1037/0022-3514.72.2.435
- English, T., & John, O. P. (2013). Understanding the social effects of emotion regulation: The mediating role of authenticity for individual differences in suppression. Emotion. doi:10.1037/a0029847
An honest note This is a short adaptation of the Berkeley Expressivity Questionnaire, using original statements rather than the published items, so your scores are not comparable to published norms. What we call impulse strength here is a self-report of inner intensity, not a physiological reading. Cultural context shapes how much expression is expected in a given place, so the same wave of feeling can be read as ordinary in one setting and unusually visible in another. None of the three bars measures how well you regulate emotion, and none of them names a problem to fix.