Emotion regulation in academic domain: Development and validation of the academic emotion regulation questionnaire (AERQ)

Abstract

Educational settings provide a great source of diverse emotions which need to be regulated. To examine the complex relations between emotional, cognitive and motivational aspects of learning, appropriate measures of emotion regulation in an academic context are mandatory. Thus, the aim of this research was to develop a psychometrically sound and contextually specific multidimensional self-report instrument aimed at assessing the specific emotion regulation strategies that students predominantly implement in various academic situations. Based on the theoretical assumptions of the process model of emotion regulation and a series of four empirical studies conducted on separate samples of high-school and university students (N1=20, N2=1030, N3=359 and N4=230), by combining both qualitative and quantitative data, the Academic Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (AERQ) was designed. The instrument contains 8 scales, each measuring a separate emotion regulation strategy: avoiding situations, developing competences, redirecting attention, reappraisal, suppression, respiration, venting, and seeking social support. All scales had adequate psychometric characteristics and were meaningfully related to the external variables examined (i.e. gender, cognitive appraisals, achievement emotions, academic achievement and goal orientations).