Development of the children's emotion regulation scale

Abstract

This thesis describes the construction of a new children's self-report scale for 8 -12 year olds, measuring emotion regulation in middle childhood. Emotion Regulation represents an individual's attempts to modulate their expressive or experiential aspects of emotion. Psychologists identify emotion regulation as a key developmental task for children in middle childhood to master, as it has implications for social competence, attention, and even mental health. There have been few psychometrically valid measures available to investigate emotion regulation in children, particularly in the 8 to12 year old age group. Fewer still are expressed in children's own vernacular. Therefore, construction of the Children's Emotion Regulation Scale (CERS) was based on Clarbour and Roger's (2004) methodology for an older adolescent sample, with developmentally appropriate adaptations.

Exploratory principal axis factor analyses of the responses of 236 children to an initial pool of items generated from emotion vignettes, yielded three factors. These factors were labelled Emotional Reactivity, Active Regulation and Malevolent Aggression. Gender differences indicated that girls scored higher on the Emotional Reactivity subscale, whilst boys scored higher on Malevolent Aggression. Simple main effects revealed an age by gender interaction on the Active Regulation factor, with 12 year old boys evidencing significantly lower mean scores than 8 or 9 year old boys or 12 year old girls. Conversely, girls showed no change across ages on the Active Regulation factor. These gender differences are interpreted in terms of differential emotion socialisation practices for girls and boys.