The Emotion Regulation Questionnaire-30 (ERQ-30): A 30-item measure of 10 clinically relevant emotion regulation strategies

People use different strategies to regulate their emotions, and these emotion regulation patterns have important implications for mental health. For over two decades, the most widely used tool for assessing emotion regulation has been the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire, a 10-item measure of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression. Here, we introduce a new 30-item version-the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire-30 (ERQ-30). Built on the conceptual foundation of the process model of emotion regulation, the ERQ-30 aims to advance emotion regulation assessments by capturing a more comprehensive range of clinically relevant emotion regulation strategies. It is designed to assess how frequently people use 10 strategies, collectively spanning all stages of the process model, including five generally adaptive strategies (behavioral activation, problem solving, acceptance, cognitive reappraisal, social sharing) and five generally maladaptive strategies (situational avoidance, social withdrawal, distraction, rumination, expressive suppression). Across two studies (Ns = 451, 658), we examine the factor structure, reliability, and affective correlates of the ERQ-30, and use its conceptual breadth to further clarify the nature of emotion regulation. We find it to have a theoretically congruent 10-factor (subscale) structure. All strategy subscales demonstrated good internal consistency reliability, and an expected pattern of affective correlates (e.g., with psychopathology symptoms, wellbeing, emotional reactivity, overall emotion regulation difficulties, alexithymia, emotion beliefs, and personality). We demonstrate that the breadth of strategies assessed by the ERQ-30 enhances its clinical utility and predictive value. Overall, the ERQ-30 has strong psychometric performance, and can now enable more comprehensive assessments of emotion regulation.