Adolescents’ Emotion Regulation Strategies Questionnaire–Extended (AERSQ-E)

1. Abstract

The Adolescents’ Emotion Regulation Strategies Questionnaire–Extended (AERSQ-E; Rådman, Claréus, & Daukantaitė, 2024) is a multidimensional psychometric instrument developed to evaluate the frequency and diversity of cognitive, behavioral, and interpersonal strategies that youth employ when confronting negative affect. Adapted and extended from the original Adolescents’ Emotion Regulation Strategies Questionnaire (AERSQ; Zhou et al., 2020), the extended version addresses psychometric limitations of prior iterations while incorporating a critical domain: aggressive outlet. Aggressive externalizing responses hold heightened clinical relevance for youth vulnerable to distress, non-suicidal self-injury, and externalizing behavioral trajectories. Comprising 23 self-report items administered on a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (Never) to 5 (Very often), the AERSQ-E is organized into six distinct subscales: Rumination/Negative Thinking, Positive Reorientation, Creative Expression, Aggressive Outlet, Social Support, and Distraction.

Extensive psychometric investigations across adolescent community cohorts aged 12 to 20 years in Sweden demonstrated a robust six-factor structure through both exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA), indicating acceptable model fit indices (e.g., Comparative Fit Index [CFI] > .90, Root Mean Square Error of Approximation [RMSEA] ≤ .06). Reliability analyses indicate high to acceptable internal consistency across five of the six subscales (Cronbach’s α and McDonald’s ω values typically exceeding .70 to .85), alongside adequate test-retest stability across multi-week intervals. Distraction emerged as a more heterogeneous construct, yielding marginally lower alpha coefficients, mirroring historical challenges observed in adolescent coping measurement. Validity investigations have confirmed strong convergent, discriminant, and concurrent validity: the Rumination/Negative Thinking and Aggressive Outlet dimensions correlate positively with internalizing problems, psychological distress, depressive symptoms, and non-suicidal self-injury, whereas Positive Reorientation and Social Support display strong negative associations with psychopathology and positive associations with emotional well-being and adaptive functioning. Overall, the AERSQ-E provides clinicians and developmental researchers with a nuanced, developmentally tailored psychometric scale to evaluate regulatory styles in youth.

2. Keywords

Adolescent Emotion Regulation, AERSQ-E, Cognitive Coping, Rumination, Positive Reorientation, Aggressive Outlet, Creative Expression, Social Support, Distraction, Psychometric Validation, Non-Suicidal Self-Injury, Adolescent Psychopathology

3. Authors

The Adolescents’ Emotion Regulation Strategies Questionnaire–Extended (AERSQ-E) was developed and validated by a research team based at Lund University, Sweden:

• Gustaf Rådman, M.Sc., Ph.D. Candidate — Department of Psychology, Lund University, Lund, Sweden. ORCID: 0000-0002-7042-0196. Primary focus on adolescent clinical psychology, non-suicidal self-injury, and longitudinal trajectories of emotional dysregulation.
• Benjamin Claréus, Ph.D. — Department of Psychology, Lund University, Lund, Sweden. Expertise in psychometrics, latent variable modeling, and adolescent mental health assessments.
• Daiva Daukantaitė, Ph.D., Associate Professor — Department of Psychology, Lund University, Lund, Sweden. ORCID: 0000-0002-1994-041X. Principal Investigator whose research program centers on youth developmental psychopathology, subjective well-being, deliberate self-harm, and the validation of behavioral assessment instruments. Contact Email: [email protected].

4. Purpose

Adolescence represents a critical ontogenetic window characterized by heightened emotional volatility, rapid neurological reorganization within frontolimbic circuitries, and increasing exposure to complex socio-relational stressors. During this developmental phase, the maturation of regulatory capacities often lags behind emotional reactivity systems, increasing vulnerability to mood disorders, anxiety disorders, and maladaptive behaviors such as non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI). While classical instruments such as the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ) or the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ) assess broad coping or cognitive reappraisal dimensions, they frequently omit concrete behavioral and non-cognitive strategies uniquely relevant to adolescents, such as creative arts involvement, physical aggression, or distinct socio-emotional support mechanisms.

The AERSQ-E was established to bridge these psychometric and clinical gaps. Originally formulated by Zhou and colleagues (2020) to capture a broader repertoire of youth coping mechanisms, the original AERSQ demonstrated several structural limitations, including cross-loading items, unstable factors across Western cohorts, and an absence of items tapping externalizing venting. Grounded in research on self-harming adolescents who routinely report employing externalized behaviors, anger venting, or physical outlets to dissipate intolerable internal states (Daukantaitė et al., 2019), Rådman and colleagues (2024) sought to:

1. Refine the item pool to optimize parsimony, eliminate factor ambiguity, and bolster psychometric robusticity.
2. Introduce a dedicated subscale—Aggressive Outlet—to evaluate behavioral externalization and physical venting, which are closely linked with clinical distress and dysregulation.
3. Provide a validated, brief, multi-dimensional self-report instrument capable of differentiating between adaptive, expressive, internalizing-maladaptive, and externalizing-maladaptive emotion regulation strategies in epidemiological, clinical, and school-based youth samples.

In clinical practice, the AERSQ-E offers diagnostic utility by mapping an adolescent’s individual regulatory repertoire. By evaluating whether a patient predominantly relies on cognitive perseveration (Rumination), interpersonal buffering (Social Support), physical release (Aggressive Outlet), or artistic sublimation (Creative Expression), clinicians can tailor targeted interventions such as Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) skills training or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). In empirical research, the AERSQ-E serves as an explanatory tool for tracking prospective trajectories from early adolescence into young adulthood.

5. Psychological Construct

The AERSQ-E measures emotion regulation strategy selection when experiencing distressing or negative affective states (such as feeling sad, disappointed, nervous, afraid, or overwhelmed). Emotion regulation is conceptualized as a multi-component process through which individuals modulate the intensity, duration, and behavioral expression of emotional experiences. Rather than classifying strategies along a simplistic, dichotomy of purely “good” versus “bad,” the instrument operationalizes six distinct dimensions:

1. Rumination/Negative Thinking

This cognitive dimension captures passive, perseverative focus on the causes, consequences, and personal perceived deficiencies surrounding one’s distress. Rooted in response styles theory, it reflects cognitive patterns where the individual repeatedly reviews past events (e.g., “Think about things I have said or done (again and again)”), internalizes global feelings of worthlessness (e.g., “Think that I am bad or worthless”), obsesses over social judgment (e.g., “Worry about what others might think of me”), or engages in unhelpful upward social comparisons (e.g., “Believe that others have it much better off than me”). This construct is a known vulnerability factor for major depressive episodes and generalized anxiety.

2. Positive Reorientation

This adaptive cognitive-behavioral construct reflects deliberate attempts to reframe adverse occurrences constructively, identify learning opportunities, maintain emotional equanimity, and plan pragmatic problem resolution. It merges aspects of cognitive reappraisal and solution-focused coping. Items capture the proactive search for silver linings (e.g., “Try to find something positive in what has happened”), forward-looking behavioral modification (e.g., “Move on and try to do things better next time”), structured problem-solving (e.g., “Try in a calm manner to solve what made me feel bad”), and acceptance of affective transience (e.g., “Stay calm and think that it will pass”).

3. Creative Expression

Creative Expression represents a behavioral-symbolic strategy wherein adolescents transform internal emotional turmoil into external artistic, literary, or expressive modalities. Drawing from expressive arts and sublimation paradigms, this dimension evaluates the translation of affect into creative acts (e.g., “Create something that expresses how I feel”), narrative prose or poetry (e.g., “Write texts (e.g., stories, song lyrics, poems)”), visual media (e.g., “Draw or paint”), or reflective journaling (e.g., “Write down thoughts about how I feel”). This strategy allows adolescents to symbolize and communicate internal distress non-destructively.

4. Aggressive Outlet

Aggressive Outlet evaluates physical and verbal externalization aimed at discharging acute autonomic arousal and intolerable emotional distress. Formulated to capture externalizing behaviors that often co-occur with severe affective instability and non-suicidal self-injury, this construct assesses direct physical motor action against inanimate objects (e.g., “Punch or kick on things”; “Try to find something to break”), relational friction (e.g., “Argue or fight with people around me”), and emergent destructive urges (e.g., “Want to hurt others (physically or mentally)”). While serving an immediate tension-reduction function, this strategy is strongly linked to functional impairment, peer conflict, and subsequent psychological distress.

5. Social Support

This interpersonal strategy captures the adolescent’s inclination to seek interpersonal contact and socio-emotional assistance when distressed. Rather than isolating, the individual engages their social network to verbalize emotional states (e.g., “Tell someone else how I feel”), obtain validation and empathy (e.g., “Seek support and comfort in others”), acquire cognitive restructuring guidance (e.g., “Ask others for advice or help”), or receive comforting somatic contact (e.g., “Seek physical contact (e.g., a hug)”). It assesses an adolescent’s capacity to utilize social relationships for co-regulation.

6. Distraction

Distraction represents an attentional deployment strategy whereby the individual disengages focus from an emotionally evocative stimulus or distress state by redirecting attention toward alternative cognitions or engaging in unrelated activities. The scale evaluates intentional cognitive shift (e.g., “Try to think about something else”), behavioral diversion (e.g., “Distract myself with something to do”), and avoidance of negative thoughts (e.g., “Try to forget that which makes me feel bad”). Distraction serves as an immediate short-term coping tool to down-regulate peak affective intensity, though its long-term adaptiveness can vary based on context.

6. Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture of the AERSQ-E is primarily situated within James Gross’s Process Model of Emotion Regulation (Gross, 1998, 2015), integrated with developmental perspectives on cognitive maturation and distress-tolerance theories.

Gross’s Process Model Integration

Gross categorizes emotion regulation strategies across a temporal timeline based on when they occur during the emotion-generative process:

• Attentional Deployment: Operationalized within the AERSQ-E as Distraction, where the adolescent alters attentional focus without necessarily changing the objective environment.
• Cognitive Change: Manifested in the AERSQ-E across two contrasting poles: Positive Reorientation (adaptive cognitive reframing and perspective taking) versus Rumination/Negative Thinking (maladaptive, perseverative cognitive processing).
• Response Modulation: Targeted via Aggressive Outlet and Creative Expression, reflecting behavioral modulation of physiological, motor, or experiential response components after an emotion has been generated.
• Situation Modification / Relational Engagement: Represented through Social Support, which alters the social environment to mitigate distress through co-regulation.

Developmental and Psychopathology Perspectives

Adolescent brain development is characterized by asynchronous maturation between subcortical limbic regions (e.g., amygdala, nucleus accumbens) and the prefrontal cortex (PFC), a dynamic formalized within the Dual Systems and Imbalance Models of adolescence. Because neural circuitry supporting executive control and self-regulation continues to develop into early adulthood, adolescents frequently exhibit elevated emotional volatility and may struggle to implement complex cognitive reappraisal. Consequently, they often rely on behavioral, creative, social, or impulsive-motor actions to regulate affect.

Furthermore, the AERSQ-E draws upon the Experiential Avoidance and Affect Regulation models of deliberate self-harm (Chapman et al., 2006; Daukantaitė et al., 2019). When adolescents encounter overwhelming negative affect and lack effective cognitive reframing or supportive interpersonal buffers, they may turn to physical outlets. The addition of the Aggressive Outlet dimension captures behaviors that share functional properties with non-suicidal self-injury—namely, utilizing physical sensations or motor release to alleviate acute internal distress.

7. Validity

The validation study by Rådman, Claréus, and Daukantaitė (2024) evaluated the psychometric properties of the AERSQ-E in a large community sample of Swedish adolescents (aged 12–20 years). The instrument demonstrated convergent, discriminant, and criterion validity across multiple criteria.

Convergent Validity

Convergent validity was evaluated by correlating AERSQ-E subscales with established measures of emotion regulation, coping, and clinical psychopathology, such as the CERQ, the Strengths and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ), and the Center for Epidemiologic Studies Depression Scale (CES-D):

• Rumination/Negative Thinking showed strong positive correlations with depressive symptomatology ($r > .60, p < .001$), generalized anxiety, emotional symptoms on the SDQ, and validated rumination indices.
• Aggressive Outlet exhibited significant positive correlations with externalizing conduct problems ($r \approx .45\text{–}.55, p < .001$), hyperactivity-inattention metrics, and measures of peer conflict. Importantly, this subscale demonstrated a unique, robust prospective association with self-reported lifetime and incident non-suicidal self-injury (NSSI).
• Positive Reorientation correlated positively with subjective well-being, life satisfaction, and resilience measures ($r \approx .40\text{–}.52, p < .001$), while demonstrating inverse correlations with depression and psychological distress.
• Creative Expression displayed moderate positive correlations with constructive emotional processing and expressive arts participation, correlating weakly or neutrally with pure symptom metrics, confirming its status as a distinct, expressive processing tool rather than an index of psychopathology.
• Social Support correlated strongly with prosocial behavior on the SDQ ($r > .45$) and perceived peer and family social support inventories.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established through inter-factor correlational analyses within the scale and against divergent constructs. While Rumination and Aggressive Outlet both denote vulnerability, their moderate inter-correlation ($r \approx .30\text{–}.40$) confirms they measure distinct behavioral and cognitive processes rather than a single generalized distress factor. Similarly, Distraction demonstrated modest associations across both adaptive and maladaptive subscales, highlighting its heterogeneous role in adolescent coping. Confirmatory factor models testing a single-factor solution or alternative higher-order structures yielded significantly poorer fit compared to the proposed six-factor model.

8. Reliability

The AERSQ-E demonstrates acceptable to high reliability across diverse samples of adolescents, evaluated through both internal consistency metrics and temporal stability indices.

Internal Consistency

In the primary psychometric validation study (Rådman et al., 2024), internal consistency coefficients (Cronbach’s α and McDonald’s ω) were calculated across the six subscales:

• Rumination/Negative Thinking: Demonstrates high internal consistency, with α ranging between .82 and .86, reflecting strong item homogeneity.
• Positive Reorientation: Consistently yields strong reliability coefficients, with α values ranging from .80 to .84.
• Creative Expression: Displays robust internal consistency (α = .81 to .85; ω > .82), demonstrating that its four items tap into a unified expressive construct.
• Aggressive Outlet: Yields acceptable to strong reliability (α = .78 to .83), confirming that externalized aggressive behaviors hang together coherently.
• Social Support: Demonstrates good internal consistency, with α values typically falling between .79 and .83.
• Distraction: Represents the only subscale with lower internal consistency, displaying alpha values commonly hovering between .60 and .68. This mirrors findings across literature on coping scales, where distraction encompasses varied behaviors (e.g., cognitive redirection vs. behavioral diversion) that show greater individual variability.

Test-Retest Stability

Subsamples assessed across multi-week retest intervals demonstrated moderate-to-high intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) and bivariate Pearson test-retest correlations ($r = .65\text{–}.80, p < .001$) across the subscales. Positive Reorientation, Rumination, and Aggressive Outlet demonstrated notable temporal stability, supporting the view that while the AERSQ-E measures transient strategy selection, it also captures durable behavioral tendencies.

9. Factor Analysis

The factorial validity of the AERSQ-E was evaluated through sequential exploratory and confirmatory factor analytic procedures.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

To refine the original 26-item Chinese AERSQ for Western adolescent populations, initial exploratory structural equation modeling and maximum likelihood EFAs with oblimin oblique rotations were executed on an initial calibration cohort. Items demonstrating excessive cross-loadings (> .30 on secondary factors) or inadequate primary loadings (< .40) were removed. The four novel items evaluating physical and verbal externalization grouped into an independent factor, forming the Aggressive Outlet subscale.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

CFA was subsequently performed on an independent validation sample using robust maximum likelihood (MLR) estimation to account for minor multivariate non-normality. The hypothesized six-factor model comprising 23 items demonstrated good fit across standard fit criteria:

• Model Fit Indices: Comparative Fit Index (CFI) ≥ .92 to .94; Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) ≥ .91 to .93; Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) ≤ .048 to .056 (with 90% confidence intervals below .060); Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) ≤ .051.
• Standardized Factor Loadings:
  • Rumination/Negative Thinking: Loadings ranged from .68 to .84.
  • Positive Reorientation: Loadings ranged from .67 to .82.
  • Creative Expression: Loadings ranged from .64 to .88.
  • Aggressive Outlet: Loadings ranged from .61 to .81.
  • Social Support: Loadings ranged from .63 to .83.
  • Distraction: Loadings were somewhat lower but acceptable, ranging from .51 to .72.

Measurement Invariance

Multi-group CFA demonstrated configural, metric (weak), and scalar (strong) invariance across gender (boys vs. girls) and age cohorts (early vs. late adolescence), evidenced by minimal changes in fit statistics (ΔCFI < .010, ΔRMSEA < .015). This confirms that group differences in subscale scores reflect genuine developmental or gender-based variations in emotion regulation strategies rather than measurement bias.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Adolescents’ Emotion Regulation Strategies Questionnaire–Extended (AERSQ-E)
• Authors: Gustaf Rådman, Benjamin Claréus, & Daiva Daukantaitė (2024)
• Construct Assessed: Adolescent cognitive, behavioral, expressive, and social emotion regulation strategies employed in response to negative affect
• Administration Format: Self-report questionnaire; administered via paper-and-pencil or electronic/digital platforms
• Target Population: Adolescents and youth, validated across ages 12 to 20 years (applicable to school, community, and clinical cohorts)
• Completion Time: Approximately 5 to 10 minutes
• Item Count: 23 items
• Subscale Structure (6 subscales):
  • Rumination/Negative Thinking (4 items: R1, R2, R3, R4)
  • Positive Reorientation (4 items: P1, P2, P3, P4)
  • Creative Expression (4 items: C1, C2, C3, C4)
  • Aggressive Outlet (4 items: A1, A2, A3, A4)
  • Social Support (4 items: S1, S2, S3, S4)
  • Distraction (3 items: D1, D2, D3)
• Response Scale: 5-point Likert scale:
  • 1 = Never
  • 2 = Rarely
  • 3 = Sometimes
  • 4 = Often
  • 5 = Very often
• Scoring Procedures:
  • There are no reverse-coded items.
  • Subscale scores are calculated by summing or averaging the corresponding item ratings within each factor. Mean subscale scores (ranging from 1.0 to 5.0) are typically preferred for clinical interpretation and cross-scale comparisons.
  • A single total score is not recommended, as the instrument assesses distinct adaptive, expressive, and maladaptive regulatory dimensions.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

• Year of Publication: 2024 (Original peer-reviewed psychometric validation study published in Assessment).
• Original Authors: Gustaf Rådman, Benjamin Claréus, and Daiva Daukantaitė (Department of Psychology, Lund University, Sweden).
• Licensing and Availability: The instrument was published under an open-access Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (CC BY 4.0).
• Fee: Free of charge. There are no licensing fees, purchase requirements, or royalty obligations for academic research or clinical practice.
• Usage Terms: Researchers and clinicians may utilize, translate, adapt, and administer the questionnaire without formal permission, provided appropriate citation is given to Rådman, Claréus, & Daukantaitė (2024).
• Correspondence: Further inquiries regarding Swedish translations or administration guidelines may be directed to Dr. Daiva Daukantaitė via email at [email protected].

12. References

• Chapman, A. L., Gratz, K. L., & Brown, M. Z. (2006). Solving the puzzle of deliberate self-harm: The experiential avoidance model. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 44(3), 371–394. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2005.03.005
• Daukantaitė, D., Lundh, L.-G., Wångby-Lundh, M., Claréus, B., Bjärehed, J., Zhou, Y., & Liljedahl, S. I. (2019). What role does emotion regulation play in the update of non-suicidal self-injury? A longitudinal study of Swedish adolescents. European Child & Adolescent Psychiatry, 30(5), 771–783. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00787-020-01558-8
• Gross, J. J. (1998). The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review. Review of General Psychology, 2(3), 271–299. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.2.3.271
• Gross, J. J. (2015). Emotion regulation: Current status and future prospects. Psychological Inquiry, 26(1), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2014.940781
• Rådman, G., Claréus, B., & Daukantaitė, D. (2024). Adolescents’ Emotion Regulation Strategies Questionnaire–extended: Further development and associations with mental health problems in adolescence. Assessment, 31(2), 482–501. https://doi.org/10.1177/10731911231164619
• Zhou, Y., Daukantaitė, D., Lundh, L.-G., Wångby-Lundh, M., & Holmes, E. A. (2020). Adolescents’ Emotion Regulation Strategies Questionnaire (AERSQ): Measurement development and associations with psychopathology. Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, 42(3), 447–460. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10862-019-09780-z

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)