Emotion Regulation Questionnaire ERQ Chinese revised version Wang Li

Professor Wang Li's team completed the revised Chinese version of the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ) in 2007. It is currently one of the most widely used standardized measurement tools in the field of domestic emotion regulation and has the most sufficient reliability and validity evidence. It is developed based on the emotion regulation process model proposed by Gross. It retains the two core dimensions of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression of the original scale, with a total of 10 items. The internal consistency reliability is higher than 0.7 in adults and adolescents. All items have been calibrated with localized semantics and are fully adapted to the expression habits of the Chinese population.

I first came into contact with this scale seven or eight years ago when I was working on an adolescent depression intervention project in a university research group. At that time, I had just started doing empirical research, and I was struggling to find measurement tools. I tested the literal translation version of the original ERQ on dozens of high school students. Many people reported that they “can’t understand what the questions are about.” I read nearly 20 core documents before settling on the revised version of Teacher Wang Li. Don't tell me, the revised questions are really more down-to-earth. The questions in the cognitive reappraisal dimension are all "When I want to feel less negative emotions, I will change the way I think about the matter", and there is no translation at all. The expression suppression question also changed the originally awkward "I suppress my emotional expression" to "I control my emotions and do not express them." The effective recovery rate of the pre-test directly increased from 72% to 94%, which saved us a lot of trouble.

Of course, this does not mean that this scale is omnipotent. Controversies over it have never ceased in the industry. Teacher Zhang, who specializes in local cultural psychology, always complains to us, saying that this scale still follows the Western research framework too much. How can Chinese people only have these two types of emotion regulation? For example, as the elders often say, "bear with the calm for a while," that kind of behavior of actively suppressing emotions for the sake of family harmony and interpersonal harmony, is it considered maladaptive expression suppression, or is it a unique adaptive adjustment strategy in our culture? ERQ can't tell the difference at all. A senior fellow in the clinical field also said that he had previously tested this test for hospitalized patients with depression. Many people's cognitive reappraisal values ​​were higher than those of healthy people. In fact, it is not that they can really regulate their emotions, but that they are so numb that they cannot perceive emotional fluctuations. The discrimination of this scale in clinical groups is compromised. These voices are all real. No one is right or wrong, they just have different research perspectives.

Oh, by the way, the biggest pitfall I have encountered before is that when I first started using it, I took it for granted that the scores of the two dimensions were added up to calculate the "total score of emotional regulation ability." Later, I read the revised original article published by Teacher Wang Li and saw that the two dimensions were clearly stated to be independent of each other - the higher the cognitive reappraisal score, it generally indicates that the adaptability of emotional regulation is better, while a high score of expressive suppression is positively related to the risk of anxiety and depression, and cannot be added together at all. At that time, I also saw a master's thesis written in this way, and the blind review was directly given a C by the reviewer, which was a big loss.

Last year, we conducted an autumn psychological survey for a middle school near my home. We also used this scale and screened out more than 20 students whose expressive inhibition scores were much higher than the norm and whose cognitive re-scores were particularly low. During the follow-up interviews one by one, I met a girl in the second grade of junior high school. The class teacher had always said that she was very sensible, never quarreled with her classmates, and did not say anything when she was wronged. She chose "strongly agree" on all four questions about expressive inhibition in the scale. After chatting for almost half an hour, I found out that her parents had reorganized their families after their divorce last year, and she was living with her grandma. She was afraid that people would pity her if she spoke out, and she was afraid of causing trouble to her grandma, so she kept all the unhappy things in her heart. Later, the school's psychology teacher followed up for more than two months, and her expression inhibition score slowly dropped. This is why many front-line psychology teachers like to use this scale, which can dig out the hidden emotional problems of children who "seem to have no problems."

There are now many teams that have expanded on this revised version. For example, one for left-behind children has added questions about "concerns about emotional expression", and another for working people has added dimensions related to "emotional labor in the workplace." In fact, these are all supplements to the original scale. To be honest, there is no right or wrong in the tool itself. The key depends on where you use it. For research on the emotional characteristics of the general population and psychological surveys in schools, this revised version is basically a choice to start with your eyes closed. If you are doing clinical or local culture-related research, you may have to add your own questions or use it with other tools.