The Communication Anxiety Regulation Scale: Development and Initial Validation

We present the development and validation of the Communication Anxiety Regulation Scale (CARS), a brief self-report measure designed to assess the use of emotion regulation strategies to manage acute communication anxiety in response to an anxiety-provoking speech task. The CARS is contrasted to existing measures of emotion regulation that assess use of general emotion regulation tendencies as opposed to strategies used in specific communication scenarios. Study 1 delineates the construction and subsequent testing of the hypothesized factor structure of the CARS. Results of confirmatory factor analyses supported the existence of four distinct subscales of the CARS, each representing a different anxiety regulation strategy: suppression, reappraisal, avoidance, and venting. Study 2 examined correlations of the CARS subscales with existing measures, demonstrating preliminary construct validity. Overall, findings provide preliminary support for the utility of the CARS as measure of communication anxiety regulation to be used by communication and psychology researchers.