ERQ — Emotion Regulation Questionnaire

The ERQ is the standard brief measure of how a client regulates emotion, not how much distress they’re in. It reports two habitual strategies side by side: changing how you think about a situation, and holding the expression of feeling in. Ten items, about two minutes.

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What it measures

Two distinct emotion-regulation styles. Cognitive Reappraisal — six items. An antecedent-focused strategy: changing how you think about a situation in order to change its emotional impact. “When I’m faced with a stressful situation, I make myself think about it in a way that helps me stay calm.” Expressive Suppression — four items. A response-focused strategy: inhibiting the outward expression of an emotion that’s already underway. “I control my emotions by not expressing them.” The two are separate strategies, not two ends of one dimension. A client can be high on both, low on both, or high on one and low on the other, and each of those four pictures means something different clinically.

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When to use it

• Early in process-based work. CBT, ACT, DBT and emotion-focused therapy all move emotion regulation; the ERQ tells you which strategy the client already leans on before you add another.
• When affect looks flat in the room but the history doesn’t match. A high Suppression score is often the explanation, and it’s a conversation the score opens usefully.
• Alongside the DERS-18. The DERS-18 measures difficulty regulating emotion; the ERQ measures which strategies get used. Together they separate “can’t” from “does, but this way.”
• Before and after a course of restructuring work. Reappraisal is the strategy a thought record trains, so a rising Reappraisal subscale is a direct read on whether the skill is being used outside the room.
• In couples or family work. Suppression has interpersonal costs the client rarely attributes to it.

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How clients fill it

Two minutes. The stem reads: “We would like to ask you some questions about your emotional life — in particular, how you control (that is, regulate and manage) your emotions. The questions below involve two distinct aspects of your emotional life. One is your emotional experience, or what you feel like inside. The other is your emotional expression, or how you show your emotions in the way you talk, gesture, or behave. There are no right or wrong answers. Please answer using the following scale: 1 = Strongly disagree, 4 = Neutral, 7 = Strongly agree.” All ten items share seven options:

• Strongly disagree
• Disagree
• Slightly disagree
• Neutral
• Slightly agree
• Agree
• Strongly agree

The items alternate between the two subscales as the client reads down the page, which is deliberate — it keeps them from answering a block of suppression items as a set.

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How Rivet scores it

Strongly disagree scores 1 through to Strongly agree at 7, with the options between running 2 through 6 in order. No items are reverse-scored. There is no total score. The ERQ reports two subscale sums: Adding the two together would mix two different constructs, so Rivet doesn’t. Both subscale totals appear live in your scoring pill.

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Reading the two styles

The ERQ has no severity bands and no diagnostic cutoff, because it isn’t measuring a level of anything. It describes habitual style. To compare a client against published norms, divide each subscale by its item count to get back to the original 1–7 per-item scale — Reappraisal by 6, Suppression by 4. Gross 2003 reported US adult norms of roughly 4.6 (SD 1.0) for Cognitive Reappraisal and 3.5 (SD 1.2) for Expressive Suppression on that per-item scale. The general finding in the literature is that reappraisal is associated with better long-term outcomes and suppression with worse ones. That’s a population-level association, and it’s worth holding loosely in the room: suppression is adaptive in plenty of specific situations, and some clients have very good reasons for the habit.

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Clinical change

No minimal clinically important difference is published for the ERQ in the source Rivet scores it from. The measure was built to describe style and to track change in process-based therapy, not to clear a threshold. Read each subscale against the client’s own earlier score, in the direction your treatment plan predicts. Rivet shows the current subscale totals only.

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When NOT to use it

• As a screening or diagnostic instrument. There’s nothing to screen for. A high Suppression score is not a disorder.
• As an outcome measure for a referrer. Style isn’t symptom relief. Send the PHQ-9 or GAD-7 for that.
• With clients who can’t yet name emotions. Every item assumes the client can identify what they feel and what they do with it. Alexithymic presentations produce a flat, uninformative profile.

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ERQ vs DERS-18

The ERQ is descriptive. It tells you how much someone habitually uses two strategies — reappraising a situation, and suppressing the outward expression of what they feel — and it does not say either is wrong. There is no cutoff and no “difficulty” score. The DERS-18 does measure difficulty, across six dimensions, with higher meaning worse. It’s the usual tracking measure in DBT and regulation-focused work. Reach for the ERQ when the strategy itself is the treatment target and you want to see it shift — a client who suppresses everything, where the work is about expression. Reach for the DERS-18 when you want to know whether regulation is improving overall. They are compatible; run both if both questions matter.

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Is it free to use?

Yes. Free clinical and research use, distributed by Gross’s laboratory at Stanford.

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Citation

Gross & John (2003). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85: 348–362. Free for clinical and research use, per the Stanford Psychophysiology Laboratory distribution. Rivet preserves the canonical item wording verbatim.

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