Cognitive emotion regulation strategies and emotional problems in 9-11-year-old children - The development of an instrument

The present study describes the development of the child version of the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ-k). Like the adult version of the CERQ, the CERQ-k measures nine cognitive emotion regulation strategies that children may use after having experienced negative life events. The original CERQ was considered suitable for adults and adolescents aged 12 and older. The CERQ-k was constructed for children of 9, 10 and 11 years of age. The present study describes some psychometric properties of the CERQ-k and relationships with measures of depression, fearfulness and worry among 717 primary school youngsters. Principal component analyses confirmed the allocation of most items to subscales, while Cronbach's alphas of most sub-scales exceeded 0.70. Cognitive emotion regulation strategies were found to be related to the reporting of symptoms of depression, fearfulness and worry, which provided some evidence for criterion-related validity.