Emotion
Is the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire actually useful?
Open access · cc by · source: Europe PMC
While the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire helps predict cognitive flexibility and coping, it does not add much predictive power beyond basic personality traits for general emotional states.
How this study connects
Role on claims
Each row is a claim on a concept or method page where this paper supports, challenges, or qualifies the statement. Roles are hand-checked — not a model guess.
The use of cognitive reappraisal is associated with greater psychological well-being, higher positive affect, and lower negative affect.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
While retrospective trait questionnaires link cognitive reappraisal to reduced global negative affect and improved well-being, a daily diary study tracking real-time emotional adjustments in high-stress roles found that managing daily negative emotions had no significant short-term daily impact on stress or well-being.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Expressive suppression is generally associated with reduced positive affect, higher daily stress, and increased depressive symptoms, although its negative effects are not uniform across all individuals.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Measures of expressive suppression fail to explain additional variance in general emotional states like anxiety or worry once basic personality traits are controlled for.
Evidence for the claim as stated.
Open questions
Tensions this paper is part of
From concept pages' “where studies disagree.” Disagreement means the same question; scope means different assays, populations, or outcomes.
While retrospective trait questionnaires link cognitive reappraisal to reduced global negative affect and improved well-being, a daily diary study tracking real-time emotional adjustments in high-stress roles found that managing daily negative emotions had no significant short-term daily impact on stress or well-being.
Study at a glance
- Design
- Cross-sectional — Online ERQ reappraisal/suppression survey with incremental validity over Big Five
- N
- N=203 · 145 female students and non-students via a British university subject pool
- Population
- University-affiliated adults
- Outcome
- Criterion and incremental validity of ERQ for affect and cognitive coping
Structured fields used in claim comparison tables when every cited study has a complete layer.
Inspect source passages
Is the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire actually useful?
These passages occur verbatim in the stored paper text. They support the points listed below; they do not verify every statement in the explanation.
203 individuals surveyed
The sample consisted of 203 students and non-students (145 female), who were recruited via the subject pool of a large British university.
two emotion regulation strategies
The present investigation examines the criterion and incremental validity of the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ; Gross and John, ), which measures two broad ER strategies that affect different aspects of emotion.
Key findings
Cognitive reappraisal was linked to higher positive affect and lower negative affect, while expressive suppression was tied to lower positive affect but not higher negative affect. Furthermore, after controlling for personality, the questionnaire's subscales still explained a unique 3% of the variance in mental flexibility and 4% in constructive self-assertion. However, the strategies failed to explain additional variance in general emotional states like anxiety or worry once basic personality traits were controlled.
Methodology
The researchers surveyed 203 individuals, mostly university students, using an online questionnaire to evaluate their use of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression. They measured how well these two emotion regulation strategies predicted participants' emotional states and cognitive coping styles. Crucially, they tested whether these strategies could predict these outcomes even after accounting for the participants' personality traits.
Limitations
Because this study is cross-sectional and correlational, it cannot prove that using these emotion regulation strategies causes better mental health outcomes. The sample was also highly specific, consisting primarily of young, female psychology and linguistics students in the UK, which limits how well these findings apply to other age groups or cultures. Finally, the questionnaire uses brief scales with only a few items, which might not fully capture the complex, real-time ways people manage their emotions in daily life.
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