The Emotion Regulation Questionnaire-Short Form (ERQ-S): Psychometric Properties in a Clinical Sample

Background: Emotion regulation is essential for healthy affective functioning. The Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (Gross & John, 2003) has been the most widely used measure of emotion regulation, and recently a 6-item short form was introduced for time-limited settings, the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire-Short Form (ERQ-S; Preece et al., 2023). It is designed to measure habitual use of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression. We evaluated the psychometric performance of the ERQ-S in a clinical sample. Methods: 531 individuals with various mental health diagnoses completed the ERQ-S and other psychometric measures of clinically-relevant constructs. Results: The ERQ-S demonstrated a theoretically congruent two-factor structure, good internal consistency, and expected patterns of associations with other constructs, supporting its validity. Conclusions: Our data suggest the ERQ-S exhibits strong psychometric properties in clinical populations. Its brevity makes it a practical tool for emotion regulation assessments in time-limited settings.