Abstract
Cognitive emotion regulation plays an important role in how people manage stressful life events. Some strategies are adaptive, while others are maladaptive and linked to several forms of psychopathology. The Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ)-short form measures an individual’s proclivity to use different strategies in response to longer term stressors. The CERQ-short was developed in the Netherlands, and although it has been standardised in several countries, it is yet to be validated for use in South Africa. The aim of this study was to evaluate the psychometric properties of the CERQ-short within the South African context. The study was conducted at a large urban university in the Gauteng province of South Africa. The above was considered on the basis of a reliability analysis and an investigation into the confirmatory factor structure of the CERQ-short using data from a group of urban South African university students (n = 1904). With some exceptions, results indicated acceptable reliability for the scales ranging between 0.58 and 0.82. Confirmatory factor analysis found reasonable support for a basic nine-factor model. The measurement properties of the CERQ-short were found to be weaker in South Africa compared to that reported in its country of origin. But it was nonetheless found to hold promise for use in our multicultural and multilingual context. In particular, it may be useful for research studies where brevity is called for.
Highlights
The influence of emotions on our daily lives can hardly be overstated
While previous research has found fairly good support for the reliability and construct validity of the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ)-full and short versions in a different population (Garnefski & Kraaij, 2006, 2007; Garnefski et al, 2001), no studies have been conducted to examine its utility in the South African context
While this study focused on the CERQ-short, future research using similar analyses is required on the full version of the measure
Summary
The influence of emotions on our daily lives can hardly be overstated. They directs attention in our environment, facilitate decision-making, shape behavioural responses and impact memory formation to highlight a few functions (Gross, 2014). Such examples show that everyday functioning requires all individuals to engage in some minimum level of emotion regulation all the time (Davidson, 1998). While wonderfully useful for adaptive functioning in general, emotions can be the cause of substantial harm. The inability to regulate emotions can produce serious disruptions to adaptive psychological functioning (Koole, 2009). Efforts to better understand this aspect of our mental landscape are not trivial
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