Emotion Regulation Questionnaire ERQ Chinese revised version Wang Li

The Chinese version of the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ), which was revised in 2007 by the team of Professor Wang Li of the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, is currently one of the most widely used standardized measurement tools in the field of domestic emotion-related research and clinical psychological assessment. This version strictly follows the scale revision process and is used in my country It has good reliability and validity in both the general population and clinical mood disorder groups. It follows the two core dimensions of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression proposed by Gross, the developer of the original scale. It contains a total of 10 items, using a Likert score of 1-5, and is suitable for use by people aged 16 and above.

When I helped with the emotional baseline screening of freshmen at a university psychology center two years ago, I initially chose another emotional regulation scale with more than 30 questions. Many students started to fish after filling in half of it, and some left half a page blank. Later, I replaced it with this version of the ERQ revised by Wang Li, and all 10 questions were clear. words, such as "When I want to feel more positive emotions, I will change my thoughts about the situation" and "I will control my emotions and not show them." The fastest student could fill it out in two minutes. The effective response rate that time was directly 18% higher than the previous one, saving a lot of effort in later screening data.

To be honest, when the original ERQ developed by Gross abroad was first introduced, the translation of many questions was very heavy. For example, one question was literally translated as "I adjust my perception of the situation to manage my emotions." Not to mention ordinary subjects, when I first studied psychology, I had to be stunned for two seconds before I understood what was being said. When Wang Li's team originally revised it, they found three groups of psychology experts and ordinary residents whose native language was Chinese to do two-way translation and semantic debugging. The final questions had almost no obscure terminology, and anyone with a junior high school education or above could understand them. At that time, they also recruited more than 1,200 subjects covering different ages, regions, and occupations for verification, and even included clinical groups diagnosed with anxiety and depression. The final confirmatory factor analysis results fully met the requirements of psychometrics, and this was officially published and promoted.

Interestingly, not all academic circles have received favorable reviews for this revised version of ERQ. I attended a clinical psychology forum last year, and a teacher doing research on adolescent emotions mentioned that when they administered tests to junior high school students aged 12 to 15, the internal consistency reliability of the cognitive reappraisal dimension occasionally fell below 0.6, which was lower than the 0.7 qualifying line required by psychometrics. He felt that the suitability of this version for younger age groups needs to be improved. There is also a group of researchers who believe that the ERQ itself only measures two dimensions: cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression. Now the relevant research on emotion regulation has long been extended to more than a dozen strategies such as acceptance, rumination, and catharsis. The two dimensions are a bit too thin, and the measured results are not comprehensive enough to fully reflect a person's emotion regulation ability.

But having said that, in the current application scenario, the status of this version of ERQ is still difficult to shake for the time being. I know a social worker who provides psychological services in the community. When he first got started, he took the results of the scale and told the residents, "Your expressive inhibition score is too high, and you will easily get depression if you hold it in all the time." Later, he was scolded by the supervisor - Wang Li's team used to be the norm when they were working on it. It has been clearly mentioned that due to the influence of traditional Chinese culture, the expression inhibition scores of domestic adult men are generally 3-4 points higher than that of women, and the scores of the elderly are also higher than those of young people. This is the result of social and cultural disciplines and cannot be directly equated with "emotional unhealthy". If you take the test in a high-pressure occupational setting such as the emergency room or firefighting, then a high expressive inhibition score may be a sign of good career adaptability. You can't just cry for ten minutes when a firefighter encounters a tragic situation, right?

When I was browsing the literature a while ago, I saw that Wang Li's team has been following up on the cross-temporal stability of this version of the scale in the past two years. They measured more than 2,000 samples of the general population after the COVID-19 epidemic and found that the reliability of the two dimensions is still stable above 0.8, and there is no obvious deviation in the norm data. There are also many young scholars who have expanded on this version, such as adding dimensions of acceptance and attention shifting, to create a version suitable for teenagers. However, the core item design and revision logic still follow the original ERQ ideas.

In fact, I have been doing psychology-related work for so many years, and I feel that good scale revision is really not a high-level job. The core is to be down-to-earth, and it can accurately measure what you want to measure. Wang Li's version of ERQ has been popular for so many years. To put it bluntly, it has hit this point - it does not use fancy questions, the test is administered quickly, and the results are stable. The researchers can use it without worry, and the subjects are not bothered to fill it out. Isn't that enough?