Use of the Cognitive Emotional Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ) (2023)

It is used to describe a person's ability to manage and respond to emotional experiences,emotional regulationit is a concept that is receiving increasing interest in mental health research and psychotherapy.

Regardless of the source, uncontrolled emotions have the potential to spiral out of control into unfortunate and sometimes disturbing situations and actions.

While most of us employ a variety of strategies to adapt and cope with stressful situations, some of these approaches are more beneficial than others.

The ability to identify, understand, and change the intensity of one's own emotions is crucial in the development of adaptive responses, especially to those emotions that are considered negative.

The following article will simply review some of the methods by which emotion regulation strategies can be measured and evaluated, versions adapted for use with children and adolescents, and guidance on how to score and interpret the results.

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What is the Emotional Regulation Questionnaire?

While emotions can be regulated in a number of ways, research suggests that some forms of emotion regulation are much healthier than others. The Emotional Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ; Gross & John, 2003) is designed to assess and measure two emotion regulation strategies; the constant tendency to regulate emotions through cognitive reappraisal or expressive suppression.

Respondents are encouraged to consider the statements about their emotional lives, particularly about how emotions are controlled or regulated. Cognitive reappraisal is an antecedent-focused adaptive strategy that affects early cognitive stages of emotional activity, whereby the original interpretation of a situation is reassessed (Ioannidis & Siegling, 2015).

In short, cognitive reappraisal fundamentally changes the way one thinks about events that potentially evoke emotions. Research shows that the use of cognitive reappraisal to regulate emotions is associated with healthier patterns of affect, social functioning, and well-being compared to expressive suppression (Cutuli, 2014).

In contrast, expressive suppression is considered a response-focused maladaptive action plan that is implemented after an emotional response has already fully developed (Ioannidis & Siegling, 2015).

How is it different from the Cognitive Emotional Regulation Questionnaire?

Cognitive emotion regulation refers to the conscious and cognitive management of emotionally arousing information (Garnefski, Kraaij, & Spinhoven, 2001) and helps control emotions during or after the experience of an adverse event. For example, when experiencing a stressful situation, one may be inclined to brood and blame or to accept or evaluate the situation positively (Garnefski & Kraaij, 2007).

The Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ; Garnefski et al., 2002) is a 36-item questionnaire developed to capture stable dispositional cognitive emotion regulation strategies when people experience stressful life experiences (Feliu-Soler et al., 2017).

While the ERQ focuses on cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression, the CERQ addresses the self-regulatory, conscious, and cognitive components of emotion regulation by distinguishing between nine different strategies:

• Self-blame: the causal attribution of negative events to oneself.
• Blaming others: the causal attribution of unwanted events to others.
• Rumination: overthinking feelings and thoughts associated with negative events.
• Catastrophizing: Explicitly emphasizes the consequences of negative events.
• Put into perspective: Putting a negative event into perspective by considering the impact over time.
• Positive refocusing: keeping attention on pleasant thoughts after the occurrence of negative events.
• Positive Reappraisal: Finding the best color by creating positive meaning for negative events.
• Acceptance: accepting and not changing a negative situation or the feelings caused.
• Refocus: Think about what steps to take and how to deal with the negative event.

The CERQ allows clinicians and researchers to measure a broader range of cognitive emotion regulation strategies with a single questionnaire.

About the Interpersonal Emotion Regulation Questionnaire

Until recent years, research in the field has focused almost exclusively on the roles of intrapersonal emotion regulation and how individual responses to stress, challenges, or emotional distress affect their well-being (Marroquín, Tennen, & Stanton, 2017). . In contrast, interpersonal emotion regulation focuses on how emotions are regulated through others without one's own efforts to bring about that regulation (Hofmann, 2014).

As social beings, the expression and regulation of emotions often occurs interpersonally with trusted others; we commonly seek the company of others to reveal emotional experiences (Barthel, Hay, Doan, & Hofmann, 2018). The regulation of interpersonal emotions can be classified in two ways; internal, if people use it to change their own feelings, and external, if people use it to change the feelings of others.

The Interpersonal Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (IERQ; Hofmann, Carpenter, & Curtiss, 2016) is a 20-item self-report questionnaire consisting of the four factors described below:

1. Strengthens positive influence- reaching out to others to increase feelings of happiness and joy - "I like to be with others when I'm excited to share my joy."
2. perspective to take- using other people as a reminder that others have a worse time - "When people remind me that others have a worse time, it helps me when I'm sad."
3. Soothing- I look for comfort and sympathy in others - "I look for other people who offer me compassion when I'm sad."
4. social modeling– looks at others to see how they might handle a given situation – “It makes me feel better to know how others handled their emotions.”

The Emotional Regulation Scale

The Emotional Regulation Scale is designed to measure the tendency to regulate emotions through cognitive reappraisal and/or expressive suppression. The items on the scale involve two distinct aspects of emotional life, namely emotional experience and emotional expression.

For example, “I keep my feelings to myself” is related to emotional expression, while a statement like “When I want to feel more positive emotions, I change the way I think about the situation” represents an emotional experience.

The cognitive reappraisal facet consists of six statements, with an additional four statements included in the expressive suppression facet.

Cognitive Reassessment Points:

1. When I want to feel more positive emotions (like joy or fun), I change what I think.
2. When I want to feel fewer negative emotions (like sadness or anger), I change what I think.
3. When faced with a stressful situation, I force myself to think about it in a way that helps me stay calm.
4. When I want to feel more positive emotions, I change the way I think about the situation.
5. I control my emotions by changing the way I think about the situation I find myself in.
6. When I want to feel less negative emotions, I change the way I think about the situation.

Suppressor expressive elements:

1. I keep my feelings to myself.
2. When I feel positive emotions, I am careful not to express them.
3. I manage my emotions by not expressing them.
4. When I feel negative emotions, I make sure not to express them.

How does the scoring work?

Along with having access to scales and questionnaires, it is equally important to know how to interpret the score.

The Emotional Regulation Questionnaire

Respondent responses are rated on a 7-point Likert scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 7 (strongly agree). The score averages all scores on each cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression subscale.

The higher the score, the greater the use of the emotional regulation strategy in question, on the contrary, the lower scores represent less frequent use.

The Cognitive Emotional Regulation Questionnaire

Scoring the 36-item CERQ questionnaire is again straightforward. The nine cognitive emotion regulation strategies are measured on a 5-point Likert scale from 1 to 5, with scores obtained by calculating the mean scores belonging to a particular subscale.

Higher subscale scores indicate greater use of a specific cognitive strategy.

The Interpersonal Emotion Regulation Questionnaire

All items on the Interpersonal Emotion Regulation Questionnaire are prospective on a 5-point scale from 1 (not at all true for me) to 5 (extremely true for me), yielding subscale scores for enhancing positive affect, perspective taking, calm and socialization. modeling.

How to find the score for:

Improvement of the positive effect - calculate the sum of the points 3, 6, 8, 13, 18
Perspective shot: calculate the sum of points 2, 7, 10, 14, 17
Soothing – calculate the sum of points 4, 9, 12, 16, 19
Social modeling: Calculate the sum of the elements 1, 5, 11, 15, 20.

As with the scores on the other questionnaires, higher scores on the subscales indicate greater use of that strategy.

Other Emotional Regulation Assessments and Tests

In addition to the known scales mentioned above, you may want to consider one of the following for your respective studies.

Difficulties in Emotional Regulation Scale (DERS; Gratz & Roemer, 2004)

The Emotion Regulation Difficulties Scale contains 36 items scored on a 5-point scale from 1 (almost never) to 5 (almost always) and was developed to measure emotion regulation difficulties along six dimensions:

1. Non-acceptance of emotional responses.
2. Difficulty engaging in goal-directed behavior.
3. Impulse control difficulties
4. Lack of emotional awareness.
5. Limited access to effective emotion regulation strategies
6. Lack of emotional clarity.

On the DERS, higher scores indicate greater difficulty regulating emotions.

Emotional Regulation Skills Questionnaire (ERSQ; Grant, Salsman, & Berking, 2018)

The Emotion Regulation Skills Questionnaire is a 27-item measure of emotion regulation skills. The successful use of skills is assessed through nine subscales; awareness, sensations, clarity, understanding, modification, acceptance, tolerance, readiness to face difficult situations and self-sufficiency.

Emotional regulation of others and oneself (EROS; Niven, Totterdell, Stride, & Holman, 2011)

The EROS scale is an effective way of examining individual differences in the use of a wide range of emotion regulation strategies, providing a better means of identifying individuals susceptible to negative psychological, physiological, and social consequences (Niven et al., 2011).

EROS is made up of two subscales:

1. Intrinsic: measures the effort to improve and/or worsen one's own feelings.
2. External: measures efforts to improve or worsen the feelings of others.

Difficulties in the Interpersonal Regulation of Emotions (DIRE: Dixon-Gordon, Haliczer, Conkey, & Whalen, 2018)

The DIRE was developed as a measure of maladaptive interpersonal emotion regulation and has demonstrated internal consistency, construct, and predictive validity (Dixon-Gordon et al., 2018).

The DIRE is one of the most widely used self-report measures of emotional dysregulation and is used to assess difficulties in emotional regulation with respect to emotional arousal, awareness, understanding, and acceptance of emotions, and the ability to act accordingly. the desired way regardless of emotion. leader (Gratz & Roemer, 2008).

Subversions of these questionnaires

Emotion regulation in children has been shown to positively influence behavior and behavior control in the classroom. Wyman et al. (2010) found that improving emotion regulation in children resulted in fewer disciplinary incidents, better behavior control, fewer aggressive disruptive problems, learning behavior on task and social skills with peers, and more assertive behavior.

In addition, emotion regulation strategies are related to the reporting of symptoms of depression, fear, and worry (Garnefski et al., 2007). Emotion regulation in children is clearly an important skill to assess and develop, as several self-report measures are designed to facilitate this process.

The Emotional Regulation Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents (ERQ–CA; Gullone & Taffe, 2011)

The ERQ-CA is a 10-item questionnaire based on the original version for adults by Gross & John (2003), which is considered suitable for use with children and adolescents from 10 to 18 years of age.

Revisions to the ERQ include simplifying the language of the items, for example, "I control my feelings by not expressing them" was considered too complicated for young children and was therefore reworded to "I control my feelings by not showing them".

In addition, the length of the response scale was reduced from a 7-point to 5-point Likert scale from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree).

Children's Cognitive Regulation of Emotions Questionnaire (CERQ-k; Garnefski, Rieffe, Jellesma, Meerum Terwogt, & Kraaij, 2007)

The CERQ-k is a 36-item adapted version of the original CERQ designed to measure cognitive emotional regulation in children and adolescents. The CERQ-k measures nine cognitive emotional regulation strategies that children can use after experiencing negative life events.

While the original CERQ was considered appropriate for adults and youth 12 years and older, the CERQ-k was constructed for children 9 to 11 years of age to better accommodate the cognitive abilities of children in this age group (Garnefski et al. ., 2007). The response format for the CERQ-k is a five-point Likert scale from 1 (almost never) to 5 (almost always) and can be used to obtain regulatory strategy scores.

How is the reliability?

A very important question for any questionnaire or scale, the following is a brief summary of the reliability of each scale.

Emotional Regulation Questionnaire

Since its development, the ERQ has been widely used in studies of emotion regulation and has shown good psychometric properties. In particular, the measurement has shown good internal consistency and temporal stability, test-retest reliability, and strong convergent and discriminant validity (Ioannidis & Siegling, 2015).

In addition, the criterion validity of the ERQ has been examined, revealing several associations with constructs related to adaptive and non-adaptive functioning. For example, greater cognitive reappraisal is associated with greater positive affect, mood repair, and life satisfaction. Conversely, emotional suppression is positively correlated with negative affect, depression, and inauthenticity (Gross & John, 2003).

Cognitive regulation of emotions questionnaire

The CERQ has been shown to have good factorial validity, discriminant properties, and construct validity. Furthermore, all the subscales have shown good internal consistencies (Garnefski, Baan, & Kraaij, 2005).

Principal component analyzes provided factor efficiency and supported the assignment of items to subscales, while the test-retest reliability of the scales was good, with most alphas greater than 0.80 (Garnefski & Spinhoven, 2001). The minimum recommended Cronbach's alpha coefficient is between 0.65 and 0.80. (Cronbach's alpha is a measure of internal stability.)

The Interpersonal Emotion Regulation Questionnaire

The IERQ demonstrates excellent psychometric properties with Cronbach's alpha coefficients between 0.89 and 0.94 for all subscales (Hofmann, Carpenter, & Curtiss, 2016). As with the other questionnaires described above, the IERQ has been translated into several languages ​​and has shown internal consistency coefficients between 0.81 and 0.89, with strong test-retest correlation coefficients (Gökdağ, Sorias, Kıran, & Ger, 2019).

These results suggest that the translated versions of the IERQ are also reliable and valid scales, with psychometric properties similar to those of the original.

Results analysis

When all is said, done and added up, how should the results be interpreted?

The Emotional Regulation Questionnaire

The higher the score, the greater the use of emotional regulation strategies, on the contrary, lower scores represent less frequent use of such strategies. Gross and John (2003) found that the average score for each strategy was as follows:

• Cognitive Retest: Men – 4.6, Women – 4.61
• Expressive suppression: Men – 3.64, Women – 3.14

Certain assumptions can then be made based on the results. For example, the use of cognitive reappraisal to regulate emotions has been shown to produce more affective, cognitive, and social consequences compared to expressive suppression.

Cutuli (2014) found that people who use the cognitive reappraisal strategy are more likely to exhibit interpersonal behaviors that focus appropriately on social interaction. In contrast, those who score higher on expressive suppression modify the behavioral aspect of emotional responses without reducing the subjective and physiological experience of negative emotions.

The Cognitive Emotional Regulation Questionnaire

Based on the results, different conclusions can be drawn regarding cognitive emotional regulation. For example, women with high levels of self-blame are 2.7 times more likely to develop depression than those who do not blame themselves (Killian, Cacciatore, & Lacasse, 2011).

A greater tendency to ruminate has been negatively associated with certain aspects of social interactions, the excessive elaboration of negative information, and a greater recall memory of negative events (Dias da Silva, Rusz, Postma-Nilsenová, 2018).

Garnefski & Kraaij (2006) found that the highest mean scores were found for the cognitive strategies 'Planning' and 'Positive Reappraisal'. 'Catastrophic' and 'Other Failure' were reported to be used less frequently.

As a guide, the average scores for each strategy are as follows:

• Self blame – 2.96
• Accept – 3.53
• Rumination – 3.72
• Positive Refocus – 3.53
• Refocus on planning – 3.89
• Positive Reassessment – ​​4.07
• Put into perspective – 3.91
• Catastrophe – 2.43
• Other debt – 2.69

How to obtain these questionnaires in PDF

A quick search online will produce several PDF versions of the measurements described above; However, if you want to access the questionnaires and learn more about their development, validation, and reliability, it's a good idea to go directly to the source. You can find a list of key references below.

IERQ– The questionnaire for the regulation of interpersonal emotions is found in Annex 1 of:

Hofmann, S.G., Carpenter, J.K. and Curtiss, J. (2016). Interpersonal Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (IERQ): Scale of development and psychometric characteristics.Cognitive therapy and research, 40341-356.

ERQ– Gross, J.J. and John, O.P. (2003). Individual differences in two processes of emotion regulation: implications for affect, relationships, and well-being.Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85348-362.

CERQ y CERQ-k– PDF files of the CERQ and CERQ-k can be accessed for research purposes directly from the authors at Leiden University, The Netherlands. Learn more about the development of CERQ at:

Garnefski, N., Rieffe, C., Jellesma, F., Meerum Terwogt, M. & Kraaij, V. (2007). Cognitive strategies of emotional regulation and emotional problems in early adolescence: the development of an instrument.European Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, 161-9.

DERS– The DERS scoring and measurement guide can be found at:

Bjureberg, J., Ljótsson, B., Tull, M., Hedman, E., & Gratz, K. (2018). DERS-16 Goals and score.

A message to take home

A growing number of researchers and practitioners recognize the importance of understanding how people use a wide range of strategies to regulate their emotions. Even when emotions seem overwhelming, it's important to remember that these emotions still provide important information.

I hope that after reading this article, you have discovered useful information and guidance on how to effectively measure emotion regulation from childhood, adolescence, and adulthood.

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