Emotion-Regulation Skills Questionnaire (ERSQ)

Abstract

The Emotion-Regulation Skills Questionnaire (ERSQ), originally conceptualized in German as the Selbsteinschätzung emotionaler Kompetenzen (SEK-27; Berking & Znoj, 2008), is a comprehensive, 27-item self-report psychometric instrument designed to evaluate adaptive, broad-spectrum emotion regulation skills. Grounded in the Adaptive Coping with Emotions (ACE) model, the questionnaire systematically assesses nine distinct facets of emotion regulation: Awareness, Sensation, Clarity, Understanding, Acceptance, Tolerance (Resilience), Readiness to Confront, Compassionate Self-Support, and Modification. Respondents evaluate their functional emotional competence over the preceding week using a five-point Likert scale ranging from 0 (not at all) to 4 (almost always).

Extensive psychometric investigations across community, student, and diverse clinical populations confirm that the ERSQ demonstrates robust structural, convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity. Confirmatory factor analyses support a hierarchical model comprising nine distinct lower-order factors loading onto a single higher-order general emotion regulation factor. Internal consistency coefficients are consistently high, with Cronbach’s alpha ($lpha$) and McDonald’s omega ($\omega$) values for the total composite score typically exceeding .90, and subscale coefficients ranging from acceptable to excellent (.68 to .86). Test-retest reliability across multiple intervals confirms the temporal stability of the measure while preserving sensitivity to therapeutic change. The ERSQ is extensively utilized in clinical trials, psychotherapy research, and affective neuroscience to assess transdiagnostic deficits, predict treatment outcomes in conditions such as major depressive disorder and substance use disorders, and monitor the development of adaptive affective mechanisms during cognitive-behavioral and emotion-focused interventions.

Keywords

Emotion-Regulation Skills Questionnaire, ERSQ, SEK-27, emotion regulation, affective science, adaptive coping, clinical assessment, psychometrics, transdiagnostic factor, Cognitive Behavioral Therapy

Authors

The Emotion-Regulation Skills Questionnaire was developed by Matthias Berking, Ph.D., and Hansjörg Znoj, Ph.D., with key international collaborations and cross-cultural adaptations led by Peggilee Wupperman, Ph.D., Ulrich Orth, Ph.D., David Ebert, Ph.D., and Stefan G. Hofmann, Ph.D.

• Matthias Berking, Ph.D.: Professor and Chair of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy at Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg (FAU), Germany. Formerly affiliated with the Department of Psychology at the University of Bern, Switzerland, and Harvard University. His research focuses on transdiagnostic emotion regulation, affective interventions, and evidence-based psychotherapy development.
• Hansjörg Znoj, Ph.D.: Professor Emeritus of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy at the Institute of Psychology, University of Bern, Switzerland. Renowned for his work in coping processes, self-regulation, health psychology, and psychotherapy outcome research.
• Peggilee Wupperman, Ph.D.: Professor of Psychology at John Jay College of Criminal Justice and the Graduate Center of the City University of New York (CUNY), USA. Specialist in emotion regulation deficits across impulse-control disorders and borderline personality pathology.
• Ulrich Orth, Ph.D.: Professor of Psychology at the University of Bern, Switzerland. Expert in developmental psychopathology, longitudinal structural equation modeling, and self-esteem dynamics.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Emotion-Regulation Skills Questionnaire (ERSQ) is to provide an empirically grounded, clinically sensitive, and psychometrically rigorous measure of an individual’s perceived capability to implement adaptive emotion regulation skills in day-to-day living. Whereas traditional instruments often focus predominantly on expressive suppression, cognitive reappraisal (such as the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire; Gross & John, 2003), or global emotional dysregulation (such as the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale; Gratz & Roemer, 2004), the ERSQ systematically assesses proactive and adaptive operational skills derived from contemporary affective science.

Clinically, the ERSQ was engineered to serve as a diagnostic and treatment-monitoring tool in individual and group psychotherapy, specifically within Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT), and specialized training programs such as Berking’s Affect Regulation Training (ART). By assessing distinct skill dimensions—ranging from basic physiological somatic awareness to complex goal-directed behavioral engagement in the presence of intense negative affect—the ERSQ enables clinicians to formulate idiographic emotion-regulation profiles. This profiling highlights specific skill deficits that warrant targeted intervention, such as an inability to decipher emotional clarity versus deficits in self-soothing or distress tolerance.

In empirical research, the ERSQ serves as a standard metric for testing transdiagnostic models of psychopathology. A growing body of literature indicates that deficits across specific ERSQ skills operate as generalized vulnerability factors for affective disorders, anxiety disorders, eating disorders, and substance dependency. Moreover, because the ERSQ assesses skill utilization over a designated recent timeframe (“in the last week”), it displays exceptional utility as a longitudinal outcome measure, sensitive to micro-level clinical gains during psychotherapy and randomized controlled trials.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct captured by the ERSQ is multidimensional adaptive emotion regulation competence. Rather than conceptualizing emotion regulation as a monolithic trait, the underlying construct reflects an integrated set of cognitive, somatic, behavioral, and experiential skills necessary for identifying, tolerating, modulating, and drawing functional information from emotional experiences. The instrument divides this overarching construct into nine operational facets, each evaluated through three targeted items:

• Awareness (AW): The ability to direct conscious attention to emotional states rather than operating on affective automaticity or experiential dissociation (e.g., consciously focusing on negative emotions when required).
• Sensation (SE): The capacity to perceive, track, and interpret physiological and visceral bodily sensations associated with emotional arousal, serving as somatic markers of affective states (e.g., recognizing physical bodily reactions in emotionally charged environments).
• Clarity (CL): The degree to which an individual can differentiate, label, and articulate specific feeling states (e.g., distinguishing anger from shame or anxiety).
• Understanding (UN): The ability to comprehend emotional reactions, trace emotional origins, interpret their functional meaning, and understand context-dependent triggering conditions.
• Acceptance (AC): The experiential willingness to experience negative emotions without judgment, shame, or immediate defensive avoidance (e.g., being at peace with negative affect rather than fighting it).
• Tolerance / Resilience (RES/TOL): The capacity to withstand, endure, and manage distress under intense, subjectively overwhelming negative emotional states without resorting to impulsive, maladaptive coping behaviors.
• Readiness to Confront (R to C): The behavioral commitment to pursue valued, meaningful personal goals even when confronting aversive, emotionally distressing situations that cue negative affect.
• Compassionate Self-Support (SESU): The tendency to mobilize supportive, self-soothing, and reassuring internal attitudes during distressing events, mitigating hostile self-criticism.
• Modification (MOD): The active, self-efficacious cognitive and behavioral modulation of emotional valence, intensity, and duration, including the ability to down-regulate negative feelings and cultivate positive emotional states.

Theoretical Framework

The ERSQ is theoretically anchored in Matthias Berking’s Adaptive Coping with Emotions (ACE) model (Berking et al., 2008), an integrative framework synthesizing cognitive-behavioral theories of psychopathology, affective neuroscience, evolutionary emotion theory, and mindfulness-based interventions. According to the ACE model, successful adaptation to environmental demands relies on the sequential and parallel deployment of specific emotion-regulation processes that convert raw emotional arousal into adaptive action.

The framework draws significantly from James Gross’s Process Model of Emotion Regulation, which outlines antecedent- and response-focused strategies across the timeline of emotional generation. However, the ACE model advances beyond the traditional cognitive reappraisal-versus-suppression dichotomy by emphasizing a staged, skills-based hierarchy:

1. Affective Registration and Discrimination: Adaptive regulation begins with the perception of somatic feedback (Sensation) and the intentional deployment of attentional resources toward internal processes (Awareness), culminating in precise semantic classification (Clarity).
2. Affective Integration and Meaning-Making: The individual analyzes the contextual relevance and cognitive appraisals driving the emotional state (Understanding), allowing emotions to serve their evolutionary function as motivational signals.
3. Affective Non-reactivity and Exposure: Before attempted modification, negative emotional experiences must be sustained without defensive experiential avoidance. This step synthesizes concepts from Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) and DBT, incorporating non-judgmental validation (Acceptance), distress capacity (Tolerance), and willingness to engage in exposure to affect-provoking contexts (Readiness to Confront).
4. Active Modification and Compassion: Finally, when negative affect is non-functional or disproportionate, the individual deploys active cognitive restructuring, soothing, and attentional re-allocation (Modification and Compassionate Self-Support) to foster resilience and psychological equilibrium.

Under this theoretical perspective, psychopathology emerges when individuals experience systematic blocks or deficits along this processing chain. For instance, attempting modification without prior acceptance often breeds experiential avoidance, while lack of somatic awareness undermines emotional clarity, leaving individuals vulnerable to diffuse, unmanageable distress.

Validity

Empirical evaluations have demonstrated robust psychometric validity for the ERSQ across clinical and non-clinical cohorts.

Construct and Structural Validity

Construct validity is substantiated by structural equation modeling and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). Studies demonstrate that while the nine subscales reflect distinct, non-redundant competencies, they systematically converge onto a single higher-order factor representing global emotion-regulation capacity (Berking & Znoj, 2008). This hierarchical structure supports using both individual subscale profiles and a single composite total score.

Convergent and Discriminant Validity

Convergent validity is documented via strong correlations with conceptually related psychometric instruments. The ERSQ total score correlates inversely with the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS; $r = -.60$ to $-.78$), indicating that higher skill execution corresponds directly to diminished regulatory difficulties. The Modification and Self-Support subscales display positive associations with the Cognitive Reappraisal subscale of the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ; $r = .45$ to $.58$), while showing minimal or negative correlations with Expressive Suppression, validating theoretical divergence.

Furthermore, ERSQ scores correlate inversely with standard measures of psychological distress, including the Beck Depression Inventory-II (BDI-II; $r = -.45$ to $-.62$), the Beck Anxiety Inventory (BAI), and the Global Severity Index (GSI) of the Symptom Checklist-90-Revised (SCL-90-R). Discriminant validity has been confirmed through weak correlations with unrelated personality dimensions (such as extraversion or open conscientiousness) and cognitive ability measures.

Predictive and Transdiagnostic Validity

Longitudinal and experimental studies demonstrate that baseline ERSQ scores predict psychological adjustment and symptom remission over time. In a landmark prospective study, Berking, Wupperman, Orth, et al. (2008) established that pre-treatment ERSQ scores prospectively predicted reductions in general distress and negative affect following psychotherapeutic treatment, even after controlling for baseline symptom severity.

In clinical trials focusing on alcohol use disorder, Berking et al. (2011) showed that specific deficits in ERSQ skills—especially tolerance and modification—significantly predicted alcohol relapse rates post-treatment. Similarly, in a randomized controlled trial of inpatient cognitive-behavioral therapy for major depressive disorder (Berking, Ebert, Cuijpers, & Hofmann, 2013), the integration of targeted emotion-regulation training generated significant enhancements in ERSQ competencies, which statistically mediated broader reductions in depressive symptomatology.

Reliability

The ERSQ displays excellent internal consistency and temporal reliability across diverse demographic groups and clinical settings.

• Internal Consistency: In the initial validation study ($N = 1,364$), the total composite score demonstrated a Cronbach’s alpha of $\alpha = .90$ in community samples and $\alpha = .93$ in clinical cohorts (Berking & Znoj, 2008). Across the individual 3-item subscales, internal consistencies remain solid despite their brevity:
  • Awareness: $\alpha = .68 – .79$
  • Sensation: $\alpha = .72 – .81$
  • Clarity: $\alpha = .77 – .85$
  • Understanding: $\alpha = .76 – .84$
  • Acceptance: $\alpha = .71 – .82$
  • Tolerance: $\alpha = .74 – .83$
  • Readiness to Confront: $\alpha = .69 – .79$
  • Compassionate Self-Support: $\alpha = .75 – .84$
  • Modification: $\alpha = .78 – .86$
• Test-Retest Stability: Over an unmanipulated two-week test-retest period in healthy controls, the total score displayed a correlation coefficient of $r_{tt} = .75 – .84$, indicating substantial relative temporal stability. Subscale test-retest reliabilities ranged from $.65$ to $.80$. Simultaneously, the instrument preserves high sensitivity to therapeutic change, exhibiting significant effect size shifts ($d = 0.60 – 1.20$) in response to structured psychotherapy protocols.

Factor Analysis

The factorial architecture of the ERSQ was originally established through exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and systematically cross-validated using confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) (Berking & Znoj, 2008; Berking, Wupperman, et al., 2008).

First-Order and Hierarchical CFA Models

In confirmatory evaluations, two theoretical models have been rigorously tested against one another: a single-factor unifactorial model, an orthogonal 9-factor model, and a hierarchical second-order model (in which nine primary factors load onto one overarching global emotion-regulation factor). The single-factor model consistently shows poor fit indices (e.g., $\text{CFI} < .80$, $\text{RMSEA} > .10$), confirming that emotion regulation cannot be represented as an undifferentiated general trait.

In contrast, the hierarchical model exhibits an excellent fit to empirical data across both psychiatric and non-psychiatric populations:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): $.94 – .97$
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): $.93 – .96$
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): $.041 – .056$ (with 90% confidence intervals within acceptable boundaries)
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): $.038 – .049$

Factor Loadings

Standardized factor loadings ($lambda$) of the individual items on their respective designated lower-order factors consistently range between $.62$ and $.89$, with all loadings statistically significant at $p < .001$. The first-order factors in turn exhibit substantial loadings on the second-order latent variable of global emotion regulation, with secondary loadings typically ranging from $.55$ (for Sensation and Readiness to Confront) to $.88$ (for Modification and Understanding). International cross-cultural validations, including Persian (Mohammadi et al., 2015), Spanish, and North American cohorts, demonstrate strong measurement invariance across biological sex and age brackets.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Type: Standardized self-report psychometric rating scale.
• Format: Paper-and-pencil or secure digital/computerized administration.
• Number of Items: 27 items.
• Subscale Composition: 9 subscales comprising exactly 3 items each:
  • Awareness: Items 1, 12, 19
  • Sensation: Items 7, 14, 24
  • Clarity: Items 6, 13, 25
  • Understanding: Items 3, 11, 20
  • Acceptance: Items 5, 17, 23
  • Tolerance / Resilience: Items 4, 18, 26
  • Readiness to Confront: Items 8, 16, 22
  • Compassionate Self-Support: Items 9, 15, 27
  • Modification: Items 2, 10, 21
• Timeframe: Evaluates behavior, emotional states, and coping responses experienced “In the last week…”.
• Response Scale: 5-point Likert scale:
  • 0 = not at all
  • 1 = rarely
  • 2 = sometimes
  • 3 = often
  • 4 = almost always
• Scoring and Indexing:
  • Subscale Scores: Calculated by averaging the 3 designated items for each skill domain (mean score range: 0 to 4), where higher values indicate greater competency in that specific emotion-regulation skill.
  • Total Composite Score: Calculated by computing the mean of all 27 items (or the mean of the 9 subscale scores), yielding a total score range between 0.00 and 4.00.
  • Reverse-Scored Items: None. All 27 items are formulated in a positive, skill-affirming direction.
• Administration Time: Approximately 5 to 8 minutes.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The original German instrument (SEK-27) and its English adaptation (ERSQ) were formally published in 2008 by Matthias Berking and colleagues. The scale was established as an open-access empirical metric to facilitate research and clinical practice. It is made available free of charge for non-commercial academic research, clinical education, and healthcare assessment under standard ethical conditions of attribution.

Commercial reproduction, electronic redistribution in proprietary assessment platforms, or integration into fee-based automated clinical software requires explicit permission and licensing from the primary developer, Prof. Dr. Matthias Berking (Friedrich-Alexander-University Erlangen-Nürnberg, Department of Clinical Psychology and Psychotherapy). Researchers using the scale should cite the foundational validation papers (Berking & Znoj, 2008; Berking et al., 2008).

References

• Berking, M., & Znoj, H. (2008). Entwicklung und Validierung eines Fragebogens zur standardisierten Selbsteinschätzung emotionaler Kompetenzen (SEK-27). Zeitschrift für Psychiatrie, Psychologie und Psychotherapie, 56(2), 141–152. https://doi.org/10.1024/1661-4747.56.2.141
• Berking, M., Wupperman, P., Orth, U., Meier, L. L., & Znoj, H. (2008). Prospective effects of emotion-regulation skills on emotional adjustment. Journal of Counseling Psychology, 55(4), 485–494. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-0167.55.4.485
• Berking, M., Wupperman, P., Reichardt, A., Pejic, T., Dippel, A., & Znoj, H. (2008). Emotion-regulation skills as a treatment target in psychotherapy. Behaviour Research and Therapy, 46(11), 1230–1237. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2008.08.005
• Berking, M., Ebert, D., Margraf, M., Wupperman, P., Junghanns, K., & Hofmann, S. G. (2011). Deficits in emotion-regulation skills predict alcohol use during and after cognitive behavioral therapy for alcohol dependence. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 79(3), 307–318. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0022809
• Berking, M., Ebert, D., Cuijpers, P., & Hofmann, S. G. (2013). Emotion regulation skills training enhances the efficacy of inpatient cognitive behavioral therapy for major depressive disorder: A randomized controlled trial. Psychotherapy and Psychosomatics, 82(4), 234–245. https://doi.org/10.1159/000351494
• Gratz, K. L., & Roemer, L. (2004). Multidimensional assessment of emotion regulation and dysregulation: Development, factor structure, and initial validation of the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale. Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, 26(1), 41–54. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:JOBA.0000007455.08539.94
• 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
• Mohammadi, R., Bahari, Z., Robat Meeli, S., Seyed Ahmadian, S. M., & Karimi, R. (2015). Reliability, validity, and normalization of Berking’s Emotion-Regulation Skills Questionnaire in the students of Police University. Journal of Police Medicine, 4(2), 105–112. https://doi.org/10.18869/acadpub.jpm.4.2.105

13. Items of the Scale (Questionnaire)