Emotion Regulation Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents (ERQ-CA)

Abstract

The Emotion Regulation Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents (ERQ-CA) is a psychometrically validated, 10-item self-report instrument designed to assess individual differences in the habitual use of two central emotion regulation strategies: Cognitive Reappraisal and Expressive Suppression. Adapted directly from the seminal adult Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ) developed by James J. Gross and Oliver P. John (2003), the ERQ-CA was modified and psychometrically evaluated by Eleonora Gullone and John Taffe (2012) to ensure developmental appropriateness for youth aged approximately 8 to 18 years. The instrument captures two distinct dimensions grounded in Gross’s process model of emotion regulation: cognitive reappraisal (6 items), an antecedent-focused strategy involving cognitive alteration of an emotional event to modify its affective impact, and expressive suppression (4 items), a response-focused strategy involving the active inhibition of emotional expressive behavior. Items are rated on a developmentally adapted 5-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (strongly disagree) to 5 (strongly agree), with a midpoint of 3 (half and half). Extensive psychometric evaluations demonstrate that the ERQ-CA possesses a robust two-factor latent structure, measurement invariance across gender and developmental age bands, satisfactory to high internal consistency reliability, and meaningful convergent and discriminant validity against measures of positive affect, depressive symptomatology, anxiety, and social functioning. The scale serves as an indispensable tool in clinical child psychology, educational environments, and developmental psychopathology for elucidating the mechanisms of affect regulation throughout childhood and adolescence.

Keywords

Emotion Regulation Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents, ERQ-CA, Cognitive Reappraisal, Expressive Suppression, Process Model of Emotion Regulation, Developmental Psychopathology, Child Emotional Competence, Adolescent Mental Health, Psychometrics, Factor Structure

Authors

The ERQ-CA was developed and psychometrically standardized by:

• Eleonora Gullone, Ph.D. — Associate Professor, School of Psychology and Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia. Dr. Gullone is an internationally recognized expert in child and adolescent developmental psychology, emotional development, and human-animal interactions.
• John Taffe, Ph.D. — Biostatistician and Senior Lecturer, School of Psychology and Psychiatry, Faculty of Medicine, Nursing and Health Sciences, Monash University, Clayton, Victoria, Australia. Dr. Taffe specializes in latent variable modeling, psychometric measurement, and longitudinal quantitative methodology.

The scale represents an authorized developmental downward extension of the original adult Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ) constructed by James J. Gross, Ph.D. (Stanford University) and Oliver P. John, Ph.D. (University of California, Berkeley).

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents (ERQ-CA) is to provide a brief, reliable, developmentally sensitive, and theoretically coherent metric for evaluating habitual reliance on cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression during childhood and adolescence. Emotion regulation—the multifaceted process through which individuals monitor, evaluate, and modify the trajectory, intensity, and duration of emotional experiences and expressions—undergoes profound maturation from middle childhood through late adolescence. Systematic disruptions or maladaptive configurations in emotion regulation strategies constitute a transdiagnostic vulnerability factor implicated in the onset and maintenance of major psychiatric disorders, including major depressive disorder, generalized anxiety disorder, social anxiety disorder, eating pathology, and disruptive behavior disorders.

Prior to the introduction of the ERQ-CA, empirical investigations of emotion regulation in youth were hampered by three major methodological constraints: reliance on adult-oriented self-report inventories that imposed an excessive cognitive and linguistic reading load on younger youth; behavioral observation protocols that were labor-intensive and challenging to scale in normative or epidemiological contexts; or omnibus coping scales that conflated emotion regulation with broader problem-solving or behavioral distraction strategies. The ERQ-CA resolves these limitations by providing a brief (10 items), linguistically simplified instrument that directly mirrors the conceptual architecture of Gross’s process model of emotion regulation. In clinical settings, the ERQ-CA is utilized to establish baseline profiles of affective control, inform cognitive-behavioral therapy (CBT) and dialectical behavior therapy for adolescents (DBT-A), guide interventions targeting affective modification, and monitor longitudinal treatment progress. In academic and community research, the instrument allows developmental psychologists to track normative shifts in strategy utilization, assess gender divergences across pubertal transitions, and study the buffering effects of adaptive regulation on environmental stress and peer victimisation.

Psychological Construct

The ERQ-CA assesses two distinct, orthogonal dimensions of emotion regulation as formulated within affective science and developmental psychopathology:

1. Cognitive Reappraisal (Antecedent-Focused Regulation)

Cognitive Reappraisal involves reframing the subjective meaning of an emotionally evocative event before the emotional response trajectory has fully crystallized, thereby altering its experiential, physiological, and behavioral manifestations. As operationalized in the ERQ-CA (items 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, and 10), reappraisal encompasses both the up-regulation of positive affect (e.g., “When I want to feel happier, I think about something different”) and the down-regulation of negative affect such as anger, sadness, or anxiety (e.g., “When I’m worried about something, I make myself think about it in a way that helps me feel better”).

From a neurodevelopmental perspective, cognitive reappraisal relies on top-down executive control networks, engaging the prefrontal cortex (specifically the dorsolateral, ventrolateral, and dorsomedial prefrontal cortices) and the anterior cingulate cortex to modulate subcortical reactivity within the amygdala and insular cortex. Because prefrontal regions undergo protracted myelination and synaptic pruning throughout adolescence, the cognitive capacity to recruit reappraisal flexibly matures markedly across the 8-to-18-year age span. Higher levels of cognitive reappraisal in youth are systematically associated with greater subjective well-being, enhanced self-esteem, interpersonal resilience, and diminished vulnerability to internalizing symptomatology.

2. Expressive Suppression (Response-Focused Regulation)

Expressive Suppression denotes the deliberate inhibition or masking of ongoing emotion-expressive behavior after an emotional response has already been generated. Within the ERQ-CA (items 2, 4, 6, and 9), suppression is captured through explicit behavioral declarations regarding the concealment of emotional experiences (e.g., “I keep my feelings to myself” and “When I’m feeling bad… I’m careful not to show it”). Unlike reappraisal, suppression targets the external behavioral output (facial expressions, verbal declarations, somatic gestures) rather than the internal cognitive appraisal of the stimulus.

Developmentally, children acquire rudimentary display rules in early childhood, learning when it is socially advantageous or culturally normative to conceal emotional expressions. However, habitual and chronic reliance on expressive suppression in youth is cognitively taxing and physiologically costly. Suppression typically fails to diminish subjective distress, leaves the underlying physiological arousal (e.g., sympathetic nervous system activation, heart rate acceleration) intact or elevated, and introduces an interpersonal barrier that compromises authentic peer communication and emotional support-seeking. Consequently, high expressive suppression in adolescents is frequently associated with social isolation, depressive symptoms, negative self-concept, and diminished relational satisfaction.

Theoretical Framework

The ERQ-CA is anchored within the Process Model of Emotion Regulation formulated by James J. Gross (1998, 2002). The process model conceptualizes emotions as unfolded dynamic response tendencies that emerge over time across a distinct sequence: Situation → Attention → Appraisal → Response. Emotion regulatory mechanisms are categorized according to the specific temporal point at which they intervene in this unfolding generative sequence.

Gross distinguishes between two overarching taxonomy classes:

• Antecedent-Focused Strategies: These strategies are enacted early in the emotion-generative process, prior to the full activation of emotional response tendencies. They include situation selection, situation modification, attentional deployment, and cognitive change (reappraisal). By modifying how an individual construes an event, cognitive reappraisal intervenes before affective responses (autonomic, behavioral, subjective) are fully instantiated, thereby neutralizing emotional distress with minimal sustained cognitive effort.
• Response-Focused Strategies: These strategies occur late in the process, after emotional responses have been generated and manifested across experiential, physiological, and behavioral channels. Response modulation (expressive suppression) requires continuous active inhibition of prepotent expressive behaviors, consuming central executive cognitive resources and generating emotional incongruence between internal feeling states and external behavioral displays.

In translating this model to developmental populations, Gullone and colleagues (2009, 2012) incorporated principles from developmental affective neuroscience. Children aged 8 to 11 rely heavily on behavioral strategies (such as distraction, physical avoidance, or caregiver coregulation) due to nascent abstract reasoning abilities. As youth advance through early and late adolescence, structural maturation of the frontoparietal and frontolimbic networks facilitates increasingly sophisticated cognitive transformations. The ERQ-CA operationalizes these developmental shifts by preserving Gross’s two-dimensional structure while simplifying the syntactic complexity, vocabulary, and item wording of the adult scale, rendering the theoretical constructs accessible to children without compromising construct fidelity.

Validity

Psychometric evaluations across diverse international populations have established the robust validity of the ERQ-CA:

Construct and Factorial Validity

Gullone and Taffe (2012) evaluated the ERQ-CA in a large normative sample of Australian children and adolescents (N = 1,114) aged 10 to 18 years. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) demonstrated that a two-factor oblique model exhibited superior fit across the entire developmental cohort compared to alternative unifactorial or hierarchical configurations. Invariance testing confirmed configural, metric, and scalar invariance across both gender and broad age bands (children vs. adolescents), verifying that the ERQ-CA measures identical latent constructs with equivalent measurement parameters across groups.

Convergent and Discriminant Validity

Empirical studies demonstrate meaningful patterns of convergent and discriminant associations:

• Cognitive Reappraisal correlates positively with adaptive emotional functioning, including self-esteem, positive affect, emotional self-efficacy, and pro-social behavior. Reappraisal exhibits significant negative correlations with child-reported depression on the Children’s Depression Inventory (CDI) and trait anxiety on the Spence Children’s Anxiety Scale (SCAS) and the Revised Children’s Manifest Anxiety Scale (RCMAS).
• Expressive Suppression correlates positively with internalizing pathology, including depressive symptomatology, somatic complaints, social anxiety, and negative affectivity. Suppression displays significant inverse associations with positive affect, peer acceptance, and emotional support perceptions.
• Correlations between the Reappraisal and Suppression subscales themselves typically range from trivial to modest (r = -.05 to .15), establishing empirical orthogonality and confirming that the two strategies represent independent functional dimensions rather than opposite poles of a single regulatory continuum.

Longitudinal and Criterion Validity

Longitudinal studies (e.g., Gullone et al., 2009) establish the predictive utility of ERQ-CA scores over a 2-year developmental period. Trajectories of declining suppression and stable or increasing reappraisal predict adaptive psychological adjustment and lower clinical distress over time. Furthermore, cross-cultural adaptations across European, Latin American, and Asian cohorts have replicated these predictive relationships, confirming that the psychological mechanisms captured by the ERQ-CA are broadly applicable across distinct cultural ecologies.

Reliability

The ERQ-CA demonstrates robust internal consistency and temporal stability across developmental stages:

Internal Consistency

In the foundational validation study by Gullone and Taffe (2012), internal consistency estimates (Cronbach’s α) for both subscales demonstrated psychometric adequacy across developmental age groups:

• Cognitive Reappraisal (6 items): Overall cohort α = .82 to .86. Subdivided by age, children (aged 10–11) yielded α values of .75 to .80, whereas early adolescents (aged 12–14) and late adolescents (aged 15–18) yielded α coefficients between .83 and .87.
• Expressive Suppression (4 items): Overall cohort α = .69 to .76. Across age strata, values ranged from α = .66 in 10-to-11-year-olds to α = .78 in older adolescents. While slightly lower in younger samples—attributable to the concise 4-item length and developing insight regarding expressive control—the coefficients satisfy psychometric benchmarks for exploratory and group-level research.
• Studies evaluating McDonald’s omega (ω) have confirmed composite reliability coefficients exceeding .80 for Reappraisal and .72 for Suppression across adolescent populations.

Test-Retest Reliability

Temporal stability evaluations over intervals spanning 12 weeks to 12 months show significant stability. Gullone et al. (2009) documented 12-month test-retest intraclass correlation coefficients (ICCs) between .50 and .65, reflecting both trait-like stability in regulatory dispositions and meaningful normative developmental variance across time. Shorter test-retest intervals (2 to 4 weeks) show stability coefficients exceeding r = .75 for both dimensions.

Factor Analysis

The dimensional structure of the ERQ-CA has been rigorously tested using exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) across numerous independent samples:

Latent Factor Structure and Model Fit

Structural equation modeling consistently demonstrates that the theoretical two-factor model (Cognitive Reappraisal and Expressive Suppression) provides an excellent fit to empirical data. In Gullone and Taffe’s (2012) landmark structural investigation, CFA fit indices robustly supported the two-factor solution:

• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): ≤ .048 (90% CI [.040, .056]), well beneath the conventional .06 threshold for superior model fit.
• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): ≥ .96, indicating strong data-model correspondence.
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): ≥ .95, reinforcing model acceptability.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): ≤ .041.

Factor Loadings

Standardized factor loadings on the latent Cognitive Reappraisal factor are consistently high across all developmental stages, generally ranging from λ = .55 to .78. Items emphasizing cognitive reframing of negative states (e.g., items 5, 8, and 10) consistently show the highest structural loadings (λ > .68). Standardized factor loadings on the Expressive Suppression factor range between λ = .52 and .76, with item 6 (“I control my feelings by not showing them”) and item 2 (“I keep my feelings to myself”) exhibiting consistently strong pattern coefficients.

Factor Correlation and Cross-Loadings

Across validation studies, cross-loadings between the Reappraisal and Suppression factors approach zero (≤ .10). The estimated latent factor correlation between Reappraisal and Suppression typically fluctuates between r = -.08 and r = .12, confirming empirical orthogonality. This demonstrates that an adolescent’s tendency to alter their thoughts about an emotional situation operates independently of their tendency to inhibit emotional expressions.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Emotion Regulation Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents (ERQ-CA)
• Alternative Title: Downward Extension of the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ) for Youth
• Authors: Eleonora Gullone, Ph.D., and John Taffe, Ph.D. (adapted from James J. Gross & Oliver P. John)
• Year of Development: 2012 (foundational longitudinal studies published in 2009)
• Constructs Measured: Cognitive Reappraisal (antecedent-focused) and Expressive Suppression (response-focused)
• Target Population: Children and adolescents aged approximately 8 to 18 years
• Administration Format: Self-report questionnaire; paper-and-pencil or secure computer/tablet-based administration
• Administration Time: Approximately 3 to 7 minutes
• Total Number of Items: 10 items
  • Cognitive Reappraisal Subscale: 6 items (Items 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10)
  • Expressive Suppression Subscale: 4 items (Items 2, 4, 6, 9)
• Response Format: Developmentally adapted 5-point Likert scale:
  • 1 = Strongly disagree
  • 2 = Disagree
  • 3 = Half and half
  • 4 = Agree
  • 5 = Strongly agree
• Scoring Guidelines:
  • There are no reverse-coded items.
  • Cognitive Reappraisal Score: Sum or mean of items 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, and 10. Sum range: 6 to 30; Mean range: 1.00 to 5.00.
  • Expressive Suppression Score: Sum or mean of items 2, 4, 6, and 9. Sum range: 4 to 20; Mean range: 1.00 to 5.00.
  • Subscale scores must be interpreted independently. Do NOT calculate a combined or total composite score, as the two dimensions are conceptually and empirically distinct.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Emotion Regulation Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents (ERQ-CA) was formally published in its psychometrically standardized form in 2012 by Eleonora Gullone and John Taffe in the American Psychological Association’s journal Psychological Assessment, following preliminary developmental research published in 2009 in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry.

The ERQ-CA is an open-access psychometric instrument for academic, scientific, educational, and non-commercial clinical purposes. Researchers and mental health practitioners may administer, score, and evaluate the questionnaire without paying licensing fees or royalties. Proper citation of the primary development and validation papers (Gullone & Taffe, 2012; Gross & John, 2003) is required in all empirical reports, presentations, and publications. Any commercial exploitation, modification, translation, or integration into fee-for-service digital assessment platforms requires formal permission from the scale copyright holders and the American Psychological Association.

References

• 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. (2002). Emotion regulation: Affective, cognitive, and social consequences. Psychophysiology, 39(3), 281–291. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0048577201393198
• Gross, J. J., & John, O. P. (2003). Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: Implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(2), 348–362. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.2.348
• Gullone, E., Hughes, E. K., King, N. J., & Tonge, B. (2010). The normative development of emotion regulation strategy use in children and adolescents: A 2-year follow-up study. Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, 51(5), 567–574. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1469-7610.2009.02183.x
• Gullone, E., & Taffe, J. (2012). The Emotion Regulation Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents (ERQ-CA): A psychometric evaluation. Psychological Assessment, 24(2), 409–417. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0025777
• MacDermott, S. T., Gullone, E., Allen, J. S., King, N. J., & Tonge, B. (2010). The Emotion Regulation Index for Children and Adolescents (ERICA): A psychometric investigation. Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, 32(3), 301–314. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10862-009-9154-0

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)