Cross-cultural and gender invariance of emotion regulation in the United States and India

Background: The ability to effectively regulate one's emotions has been established as an important transdiagnostic mechanism in the development and maintenance of psychopathology. To date, much of the research on emotion regulation (ER) has been conducted in Western, educated, industrialized, rich, and democratic (WEIRD) samples. Specifically, there is a dearth of cross-cultural construct equivalence studies on measures of ER. Establishing measurement equivalence is an important first step to facilitate future research on ER in culturally diverse samples. Methods: The present study sought to validate the latent structures of three commonly used ER measures: the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ), Ruminative Responses Scale (RRS-10), and Acceptance subscale of the Five-Facet Mindfulness Questionnaire (FFMQ-AS). Measurement equivalence was examined across 123 American and 121 Indian participants (M-age = 36.60) and across gender. Results: Cross-cultural confirmatory factor analyses revealed configural equivalence (i.e., same factor structures) in both cultural groups across all three measures. The RRS-10 met weak invariance across cultures; however, factor loadings were not equal across the two samples for all items on the ERQ or FFMQ-AS. Consequently, a partial invariance solution was identified, and all measures subsequently met criteria for Level 2 strict cross-cultural invariance. Across gender, full invariance was found on all measures except the FFMQ-AS. Conclusion: Findings suggest that the structure of ER processes is largely invariant across these two cultural groups, with a few notable exceptions, pointing to the importance of continued work in this area.