Expressive flexibility and resilience among U.S. military college students: Evaluating the enhancing and suppressing of emotions and resilience

Abstract

Significant research has confirmed the necessity to better comprehend psychological constructs that are essential in predicting and influencing human performance, in particular, assessing expressive flexibility and resilience. However, limited research has investigated the relationships that exist between these two constructs that are critical protective factors in facilitating the mental health and the well-being of individuals. Through a number of structural equation modeling (SEM) techniques, the current endeavor evaluates this gap to assess the relationship between these two constructs. Utilizing a military student sample from a private U.S. military university (N = 107), participants completed the Resilience Scale for Adults (RSA) and the Flexible Regulation of Emotional Expression (FREE) scale. Correlations matrixes reported positive relationships between expressive flexibility and resilience. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFAs) revealed a bi-factor models of expressive flexibility and resilience. Additional CFAs revealed a two-factor model structure between expressive flexibility and resilience. Implications for future work are offered.

A Longitudinal Examination of the Association Between Meaning in Life, Resilience, and Mental Well-Being in Times of Coronavirus Pandemic

“…Resilience is a powerful personal resource that helps people to cope with the pandemic challenges (Yıldırım et al, 2020a ), which in turn improves their mental health and well-being. Consistent with the results of this study, past research showed that resilience was significantly associated with positive (e.g., life satisfaction, psychological well-being) and negative (e.g., depression, anxiety) mental well-being indicators (Bonanno, 2004 ; Arslan, 2015 ; Arslan and Balkis, 2016 ; Kansky and Diener, 2017 ; Cohen et al, 2020 ; Georgoulas-Sherry, 2020 ; McDonnell and Semkovska, 2020 ; Yıldırım and Arslan, 2020 ; Yıldırım and Çelik Tanrıverdi, 2020 ). For example, Gao et al ( 2017 ) reported that resilience was a significant predictor of better general well-being and lower mental health problems.…”

Reserve Soldiers’ Psychological Resilience Impact to Sustainable Military Competences: On the Mediating Role of Psychological Skills (Effort, Self-Efficacy, Proactivity)

“…Both models are statistically significant, but it can be seen in Table 3 that calculated test values (χ 2 , ECVI, AIC, and BCC) for Model 2 demonstrated a somewhat better model fit when compared to Model 1 test values. In general, should be noted that the RMSEA value above 0.08 is acceptable, but for the models presented, this value is below 0.08, proving that the fit guides meet the necessities for SEM [63,64]. In addition, the differences between test values of these models are not essential, for example: ∆CFI is 0.003 and ∆IFI is 0.003, ∆TLI is 0.038 and ∆ECVI is 0.005, which do not surpass the critical value [60].…”

Expressive Flexibility and Mental Health: The Mediating Role of Social Support and Gender Differences

“…In this context, the concept of expressive flexibility was proposed to understand one’s ability to enhance and suppress emotional expressions to adapt to contextual demands [ 5 , 15 , 16 ]. Studies showed that resilience was positively associated with expressive flexibility [ 17 ], emotional flexibility [ 18 ], and coping flexibility [ 13 ]. Some researchers even identified expressive flexibility as one key component of resilience, highlighting the importance of flexibility in the regulation of emotions [ 19 , 20 , 21 , 22 ].…”