Emotion Regulation Self-Efficacy Scale

The "Emotion Regulation Self-Efficacy Scale" is currently the most widely used standardized self-assessment tool in the world to measure an individual's level of confidence in their own emotion regulation abilities. The original version was compiled by a team of Italian psychologists Caprara in 2008. The mainstream domestic version is the Chinese version revised by Wang Yujie and other scholars in 2013. The overall reliability and validity meet the requirements of psychometrics and is widely used in clinical psychological assessment, mental health surveys, professional ability screening and other scenarios.

To put it bluntly, this scale is like your estimate of whether you can pass the second semester of the exam - it does not measure how good your current emotion regulation skills are, but whether you believe you can handle your emotions. This confidence actually affects your subsequent performance under pressure more than your current skills. Last week, when I was stationed at a corporate EAP site, I met a young girl who works in Internet operations. She had just accepted the 618 promotion project and had been working on it for three consecutive weeks. When filling out the scale, I stared at the question "I can quickly calm down after being criticized by the leader" and hesitated for three minutes. Finally, I chose "Not at all". She looked up and said to me, "I used to scold myself for having a bad temper. I didn't believe that I could stabilize myself after doing it for a long time."

Interestingly, the academic community has yet to come to a unified conclusion on the dimensionality of this scale. The original version of Caprara is divided into three dimensions: efficacy in regulating positive emotions, efficacy in regulating frustrated/painful emotions, and efficacy in regulating anger/irritability. The earliest revised version in China also followed this framework. However, when a team from the Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences conducted a retest on adolescent groups in 2019, they found that domestic teenagers have a very blurry perception of the boundaries between "frustration" and "anger," and the two dimensions merged into "efficacy in regulating negative emotions" and "efficacy in regulating positive emotions" have a higher degree of adaptability. There are also many clinical consultants who feel that the questions in the existing scale are too biased towards cognitive regulation and do not cover the confidence of action strategies at all, such as practical statements such as "I can relieve anxiety through exercise." Therefore, many teams have been revising the supplementary version in the past two years, and the noise is quite lively.

I have been using this scale for almost 5 years and have encountered many pitfalls. Two years ago, when I was doing a psychological survey for freshmen in college, a colleague deliberately complained about the futility of this thing: "Students choose the best when filling out the form, and they all get high scores on the test. If they are really broken up or fail a class, should they collapse or collapse?" In fact, it’s not that the scale is inaccurate, it’s that most people didn’t explain the instructions clearly when taking the test – this scale measures “do you believe you can do it”, not “whether you have already done it”. Many respondents will regard it as an “emotional stability test” and unconsciously embellish their daily performance when filling out the test, resulting in naturally distorted results. Later, I would add one more sentence before giving interviews to visitors: "If you think, 'I know the method but just don't want to use it,' don't choose the appropriate one, just choose the level that you really think you can do." With just one sentence, the reliability of the effective data after actual testing can be increased by about 12%.

When it comes to practical applications, the first thing that comes to my mind is not the scientific research data in the laboratory, but the interesting recruitment stories I talked about while having dinner with an HR friend from an Internet company a while ago. They added 12 simplified version of the scale questions to the final interview for sales positions, which were not included in the total score and were only used for reference. After collecting data for half a year, they found that candidates with scores below 30 points were 47% more likely to leave due to emotional problems within 3 months after joining than those with high scores. Now they will give department heads a heads-up in advance and provide more one-on-one emotional support to such new employees, and the turnover rate has really dropped a lot. Of course, some people don't agree with this usage, and think that using psychological scales in recruitment is a disguised form of discrimination. I agree with this. After all, it is just a reference tool, and it is too ridiculous to use it as a screening threshold.

Oh, by the way, there have been a lot of controversies about the localization of this scale in the past two years. One question in the original version is "I can exercise restraint and avoid impulsive consumption when I am happy." However, for many East Asians, inviting friends to drink milk tea and buying gifts for family members when they are happy are normal ways of expressing emotions, and there is no need to "restraint" at all. The cultural adaptability of this type of question has been criticized. Last year, the team from Southwest University made a more localized revision, replacing this type of question with "I can be happy without getting carried away and affecting other people." The actual test is indeed more in line with the perception of the domestic population.

When I had dinner with my clinical brother last time, I particularly agreed with what he said: All psychological scales are essentially rulers, and you cannot use a height ruler to measure weight. The greatest significance of the Emotion Regulation Self-Efficacy Scale is never to label people with "poor emotional ability", but to help many people avoid the misunderstanding of "I am born with a bad temper and cannot change it" - your immediate avoidance and inexplicable irritability when encountering problems may not be a lack of ability, but that you have never believed that you can handle your emotions. By the way, if ordinary people want to test themselves, don't look for random paid tests on the Internet. Just look for the Chinese version with norms and scoring rules. Don't be afraid even if the score is low. This thing is like measuring muscle mass before fitness. If it is low, just practice slowly. It is not something that cannot be changed in a lifetime.