An Online Survey to Explore the Psychometric Properties of a New and Theory-driven Measure of Emotion Regulation (the Perth Emotion Regulation Competency Inventory) When Used in a Range of Clinical and Non-clinical Populations.

Despite the term 'emotion' being commonly used in day-to-day language, within the research literature on emotion regulation (both within the health field and more broadly) there is great variety in the terminology and scales of measurement used. So much so that Buck describes the field as "conceptual and definitional chaos" (Buck 1990, p.330). However Gross has recently renewed his extended process model of emotion regulation and this is now a widely established model although used more frequently in cognition research than in health research (see Gross 2015 for a full description of the model)

In 1998 Gross described emotion regulation as "shaping which emotions one has, when one has them, and how one experiences or expresses those emotions" (Gross 1998). One of the key points which this model suggests is that each of the 5 steps offer potential for emotion regulation and that there is no limit as to the number or type of activities which might serve this purpose.

It is this ability to regulate emotions (i.e. a person's capacity to successfully modify the trajectory of their emotions), which has been established as an important but complex concept in health research. A number of systematic reviews have explored what is known about emotion regulation across a variety of mental health diagnoses (e.g. Sloan et al 2017, Hu et al 2014). Fernandez et al 2014 argue that it is a key transdiagnostic concept using the Research Domain Criteria framework.

As poor emotion regulation has therefore been implicated in the onset and maintenance of a range of mental health conditions, it has subsequently been the target of a number of psychological interventions. Given that affective instability and reactivity, and the use of problematic regulation strategies, are some of the core criteria for EUPD, many of the treatment approaches for this clinical group address emotion regulation. It remains unclear what the mediating or moderating role of emotion regulation is in influencing treatment outcome. A comprehensive, theoretically and psychometrically sound instrument to measure emotion regulation is therefore vital for the development or adaptation of these types of interventions and the subsequent research examining mechanisms of action.

There are numerous self-report questionnaires which are used to quantify emotion regulation. However many of these have psychometric and/or theoretical weaknesses which could potentially impact on the quality of research and the conclusions drawn from this research. Preece and colleagues (2018) describe and evaluate the existing 13 self-report measures relevant to the concept of emotion regulation. In summary they argue that none of these scales :