Used to describe a person’s ability to manage and respond to emotional experiences, emotion regulation is a concept receiving ever-growing interest in mental health and psychotherapy research.
Regardless of the source, unchecked emotions have the potential to spin out of control and escalate to regrettable and sometimes distressing situations and actions.
While most of us apply a range of strategies to adapt and cope with stressful situations, some of these approaches are more beneficial than others.
The ability to identify, understand, and modify the intensity of one’s emotions is essential in the development of adaptive responses, particularly towards those emotions regarded as negative.
The following article will examine just some of the methods by which emotion regulation strategies can be measured and assessed, adapted versions for use with children and adolescents, and guidance on how to score and interpret the results.
Before you read on, we thought you might like to download our three Emotional Intelligence Exercises for free. These science-based exercises will not only enhance your ability to understand and work with your emotions but will also give you the tools to foster the emotional intelligence of your clients, students, or employees.
While emotions can be regulated in a variety of ways, research suggests that some forms of emotion regulation are much healthier than others. The Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ; Gross & John, 2003) is designed to assess and measure two emotion regulation strategies; the constant tendency to regulate emotions by cognitive reappraisal or expressive suppression.
Respondents are invited to consider statements regarding their emotional life, particularly how emotions are controlled or regulated. Cognitive reappraisal is an adaptive, antecedent-focused strategy that affects the early cognitive stages of emotional activity, whereby the original interpretation of a situation is re-evaluated (Ioannidis & Siegling, 2015).
Put simply, cognitive reappraisal is fundamentally changing the way one thinks about potentially emotion-eliciting events. Research indicates that using cognitive reappraisal to regulate emotions is associated with healthier patterns of affect, social functioning, and well-being when compared to expressive suppression (Cutuli, 2014).
Conversely, expressive suppression is considered a maladaptive, response-focused, plan of action implemented after an emotional response has already fully developed (Ioannidis & Siegling, 2015).
Cognitive emotion regulation refers to the conscious, cognitive handling of emotionally arousing information (Garnefski, Kraaij, & Spinhoven, 2001), and assists in the control of emotions during or after the experience of an adverse event. For instance, when experiencing a stressful situation, one might be inclined to ruminate and blame or to accept or positively reappraise the situation (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).
Where 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:
The CERQ enables clinicians and researchers to measure a broader range of cognitive emotion regulation strategies with a single questionnaire.
These detailed, science-based exercises will help you or your clients understand and use emotions advantageously.
