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Self-Awareness of Emotion and Expression of Emotion
Chapter III: Methodology
To assess participants' self-reports of two aspects of emotion, self-awareness of emotion
and expression of emotion to others, the Emotion Expression Scale for Children (EESC) (Penza-
Clyve & Zeman, 2002; see Appendix L1-1) was used. The EESC is a 16-item questionnaire
developed to assess two aspects of emotion expression, Poor Emotion Awareness (eight items),
and Expressive Reluctance (eight items). The Poor Emotion Awareness subscale assesses an
individual's difficulty in identifying internal emotional experiences, and the Expressive
Reluctance subscale assesses individual's reluctance to express emotion to others (Sim &
Zeman, 2006). Items on EESC are rated on a 5-point Likert-style scale with scores of / = "not at
all like me" or "not at all true," 2 = "a little bit like me" or "a little true," 3 = "kind of like
me" or "somewhat true," 4 = "a lot like me" or "very true," and 5 = "always like me" or
"extremely true." Higher scores represent poorer emotion awareness and greater reluctance to
express emotion. These two subscales of the EESC have been implemented in a number of
studies to address its specific emotion awareness or expression (J. L. Zeman, personal
communication, March, 6, 2007; Sim & Zeman, 2004; Suveg, Kendall, Comer, & Robin, 2006;
Zeman, Shipman, & Suveg, 2002). For the present study, the two subscales, Poor Emotion
Awareness and Expressive Reluctance were utilized separately to address the participants'
specific emotion expression.
Research conducted assessing the psychometric properties of the EESC provide support
regarding its reliability to measure poor emotion awareness and reluctance to express negative
emotion states (Penza-Clyve & Zeman, 2002). On research using a community sample of 208
fourth and fifth grade children, Cronbach's alphas for the EESC subscales for Poor Awareness
and Expressive Reluctance were .83 and .81, respectively (Penza-Clyve & Zeman, 2002). In the
present study, the Cronbach's alphas for subscales Poor Awareness and Expressive Reluctance
were .84 and .85, respectively. Research supporting the validity of EESC indicates that it is
positively correlated with sadness and anger inhibition and dysregulated expression, and
negatively correlated with emotion regulation coping (Sim & Zeman, 2004; Zeman et al., 2002)
in the Children's Anger Management Scale (CAMS) (Zeman, Shipman, & Penza-Clyve, 2001)
and the Children's Sadness Management Scale (CSMS) (Zeman et al., 2001).
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