Emotion regulation refers to the processes by which people influence which emotions they experience, when they experience them, and how these emotions are expressed. Unlike coping, which is usually framed as a response to stress, emotion regulation also includes everyday emotional awareness, modulation, expression, and recovery.
Emotion regulation may be automatic or deliberate and may involve attention, interpretation, behavior, physiological responses, expression, interpersonal support, and acceptance.
These measures assess how people regulate emotions through strategies such as reappraisal, suppression, attention, situation modification, control, and other habitual regulatory styles.
The Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ) reflects this model by focusing on two widely studied strategies: cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression.
The Emotion Regulation Inventory (ERI) assesses a broader range of strategies, including situation modification, attentional deployment, and cognitive change.
The Regulation of Emotion Systems Survey (RESS) assesses the use of multiple emotion regulation strategies, providing a profile of how individuals typically respond to negative emotions.
The Affective Style Questionnaire (ASQ) assesses typical emotional responding styles, including concealing, adjusting, and tolerating emotions.
The State Emotion-Regulation Questionnaires (SERQ) assess the use of emotion-regulation strategies in response to specific emotional situations and experiences.
The Emotion Regulation Strategy Scale (ERSS) assesses nine emotion regulation strategies in both intrapersonal and interpersonal contexts.
These instruments assess emotion regulation as a set of difficulties or competencies, including emotional awareness, clarity, acceptance, impulse control, access to strategies, and the ability to act effectively under emotional distress.
The Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS), and its short forms, measure multiple aspects of dysregulation, including lack of emotional awareness, poor clarity, impulse control difficulties, and limited access to effective regulation strategies.
The State Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (S-DERS) captures momentary difficulties in emotion regulation.
The State Emotion Regulation Inventory (SERI) assesses state-level regulation strategies and processes.
The Perth Emotion Regulation Competency Inventory (PERCI) assesses perceived ability to regulate both negative and positive emotions, reflecting a competency-based approach to emotion regulation.
The Emotion Regulation Skills Questionnaire (ERSQ) assesses adaptive emotion regulation skills, including awareness, clarity, acceptance, and the ability to modify emotional states.
The Emotion Regulation Checklist (ERC) assesses children's emotion regulation and emotional lability, including flexibility, mood stability, empathy, and dysregulated negative affect.
The Reactivity, Intensity, Polarity and Stability Questionnaire (RIPoSt) assesses emotional dysregulation across dimensions of emotional reactivity, affective intensity, polarity of emotional responses, and affective stability.
The Brief Emotion Dysregulation Scale (BEDS) assesses emotional dysregulation through emotional sensitivity, emotional lability, and negative consequences associated with difficulties regulating emotions.
The Emotional Processing Scale (EPS-25, EPS-W) assesses difficulties in processing emotional experiences, including suppression, unprocessed emotion, avoidance, impoverished emotional experience, and signs of emotional dysregulation. ©
Cognitive emotion regulation measures assess how people use thoughts, attention, interpretation, and meaning-making to change, maintain, amplify, or reduce emotional responses.
The Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ) assesses cognitive strategies such as acceptance, positive reappraisal, rumination, catastrophizing, and self-blame.
⇒ Rumination and other repetitive negative thinking processes are covered in the Cognitive-Behavioral domain.
These measures assess beliefs and attitudes about emotions themselves: whether emotions are seen as useful, dangerous, controllable, unacceptable, shameful, or worth expressing. Such beliefs may shape emotional avoidance, suppression, acceptance, and the choice of regulation strategies.
The Emotion Control Values (ECV) scale assesses beliefs and values about controlling emotions, including the extent to which emotional expression is viewed as something that should be restrained or regulated.
The Emotion Beliefs Questionnaire (EBQ) assesses beliefs about whether positive and negative emotions are controllable or uncontrollable, useful or useless.
The Generalized Expectancy for Negative Mood Regulation Scale (NMR) assesses beliefs about one's ability to regulate and improve negative mood states.
Emotion regulation also involves how emotions are expressed, inhibited, or adjusted in social and personal contexts. These measures emphasize expressive control and the ability to flexibly adapt emotional expression to the situation.
The Flexible Regulation of Emotional Expression Scale (FREE) assesses the ability to enhance and suppress emotional expression depending on situational demands.
The Emotion Control Questionnaire (ECQ2) assesses tendencies toward emotional control and inhibition, including rehearsal of upsetting events, suppression of emotional expression, aggression control, and benign control.
The Self-Expression and Emotion Regulation in Art Therapy Scale (SERATS) assesses emotional expression and regulation processes associated with art-based activity and art therapy.
Emotion regulation is not limited to internal processes. These measures assess how people regulate emotions in social interaction, seek support, influence others' emotions, or rely on interpersonal strategies.
The Emotion Regulation of Others and Self (EROS) assesses strategies used to improve or worsen emotional states in oneself and others.
The Interpersonal Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (IERQ) focuses on how individuals use others to regulate their own emotions, including soothing, perspective taking, social modeling, and enhancing positive affect.
The Regulation of Others' Emotions Scale (ROES) assesses strategies used to regulate other people's emotions, including attempts to improve, worsen, calm, intensify, or redirect another person's emotional state.
The External Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (EERQ) assesses emotion regulation received from another person within a specific relationship, including problem solving and reappraisal, invalidation, empathy, avoidance, and distraction or soothing.
⇒ Coping. Emotion regulation overlaps with coping, but coping is usually focused on responses to stress, demands, and difficult life situations.
⇒ Mindfulness and acceptance-based processes are closely related to emotional awareness, nonreactivity, acceptance, and flexible regulation of internal experience.
⇒ Cognitive-behavioral approaches describe emotion regulation through appraisal, avoidance, rumination, safety behaviors, and other cognitive and behavioral processes.
⇒ Emotional Traits. Emotion regulation is related to broader emotional dispositions such as emotional reactivity, affect intensity, emotional awareness, and alexithymia.