Validation Evidences of a Measure of Personal Characteristics of Emotional Regulation

AbstractThis article presents the Emotion Regulation Profile (ERP) as an instrument for measuring individual differences in the regulation of emotions. The ERP consists of 15 vignettes that portray everyday life situations describing pleasant (nine vignettes) and unpleasant (six vignettes) events. Each vignette assesses the number of adaptive/functional and maladaptive/dysfunctional responses chosen by the participants. The instrument was administered to a sample of 686 people between the ages of 18 and 51. The sample was divided into two groups of 343 participants each so that exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis could be conducted. Results from the principal component analysis (first sample) corroborated the bifactorial structure identified in the original study of the measure, that is, a regulation of negative emotion factor (down regulation) and a regulation of positive emotion factor (up regulation). Furthermore, a set of confirmatory factor analysis (second sample) revealed that the proposed bifactorial structure showed good fit indices. Finally, it was possible to propose a reduced version of the ERP with six vignettes (three describing pleasant events and three describing unpleasant events) to adequately assess the different strategies people use when regulating their emotions.