The French version of the emotion regulation questionnaire for children and adolescents

Intrapersonal emotion regulation refers to individuals’ ability to effectively manage and respond to their own emotional experience. The Emotion Regulation Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents (ERQ-CA) is one of the main self-reporting tools assessing intrapersonal emotion regulation in middle age children and adolescents. This instrument measures the frequency of use of two types of emotion regulation strategies, cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression. The ERQ-CA only focused on the frequency of use of these strategies, thus a parallel set of items measuring the efficacy of use of cognitive reappraisal and of expressive suppression has been recently proposed in adults. As no self-reporting tool assessing emotion regulation in middle-age children has yet been validated in a French sample, this study aimed to validate the French version of the ERQ-CA and the parallel set of items exploring the efficacy of use of the two emotion regulation strategies in children and adolescents. A power analysis using a Monte-Carlo simulation recommended a sample size of 140 participants. Therefore, a total of 140 children and adolescents (66 girls, mean age = 12.30 years; SD = 2.59 years; range = 8-16 years) were included in this study. Confirmatory Factorial Analyses confirmed the soundness of the two-factor solution for the ERQ-CA and the parallel set of items (RMSEA   .93). Given the low numbers of items in the ERQ-CA, internal consistency was good (α > .70). This study confirmed that the ERQ-CA is an appropriate instrument to assess the frequency of use of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression in children and adolescents. In addition, this study demonstrated the validity of the parallel set of items to evaluate the efficacy of use of these two strategies. The combination of these two instruments should thus contribute to increase our understanding of the development of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression in children and adolescents. Further studies should be conducted to establish robust norms that can be useful in clinical practice.