Argentine adaptation of the emotion regulation questionnaire (ERQ): new psychometric evidence

Emotion regulation (ER) is an individual’s dynamic process of downregulating or upregulating emotions to fulfil personal goals. A greater understanding of ER is crucial due to its emergence as one of the most studied constructs in psychology and its transdiagnostic nature (Aldao et al., 2016). To build knowledge about ER is essential to have valid and reliable measurement instruments. The Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ) is a widely used scale that asses two ER strategies: cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression. While the Argentine adaptation of the ERQ showed promising evidence, new psychometric evidence is needed. This study targets to (1) test the factor structure of the ERQ; (2) assess gender and age invariance; (3) test the latent factor means difference across gender and age; (4) analyze the reliability of the ERQ. A convenience community sample of 668 adults between 18 and 65 years (M = 33,97; SD = 11,59; regarding gender, 74% reported women and 26% men) was collected. Multigroup confirmatory factor analysis led to an 8-item 2-factor structure version that yielded full configural, metric and scalar invariance across gender and age. Latent mean comparisons showed that men reported more frequent use of expressive suppression than women, and that older people seemed to rely more on reappraisal than younger. Concerning reliability, values of alpha, omega, and greatest lower bound were acceptable. The present investigation proposes the utilization of the 8-item ERQ, which assess the same two factor as the original (Gross & John, 2003) and is a valid and reliable instrument.