The German Version of the Emotion Awareness Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents: Associations with Emotion Regulation and Psychosocial Adjustment

Abstract

Emotional awareness is an important variable for children’s and adolescents’ social and emotional development. The aim of this study was to examine the psychometric properties (e.g., factor structure, internal consistencies) of scores on the German translation of the Emotion Awareness Questionnaire (EAQ; Rieffe, Oosterveld, Miers, Meerum Terwogt, & Ly, 2008). Furthermore, to examine the concurrent validity, associations of the six subscales (Differentiating Emotions, Verbal Sharing of Emotions, Not Hiding Emotions, Bodily Unawareness, Attending to Others’ Emotions, Analyses of Emotions) with emotion regulation, internalizing and externalizing problems, and prosocial behavior were investigated. Questionnaire data of 1,018 adolescents aged between 11 and 18 were analyzed. The proposed six-factor structure was replicated and internal consistencies were satisfactory. Meaningful associations of the six EAQ subscales with emotion regulation and psychosocial adjustment were found, proving the concurrent validity of this questionnaire. In general, higher emotional awareness was associated with more functional emotion regulation and prosocial behavior, and less dysfunctional emotion regulation and internalizing and externalizing problems. Significant gender differences were detected and are discussed. Overall, the findings suggest that the German EAQ is a useful instrument to assess children’s and adolescents’ emotional awareness.

Acknowledgments

We wish to thank Anastasia Byler for native speaker advice. Moreover, we would like to thank Marco Daniel Gulewitsch, Simone Kirst, Rosemarij van Veen, and Carolien Rieffe for the collaboration in translating the EAQ.

Notes

1 Originally, this subscale was named Bodily Awareness (Rieffe et al., 2008). As higher scores indicate less bodily awareness, the scale has been renamed Bodily Unawareness (Rieffe & Camodeca, 2016).

2 For other research purposes in this project, some SDQ items were slightly modified to produce parallel versions of the self- and parent-report measure (Vierhaus, Rueth, Buchberger, & Lohaus, 2018). However, changes to the self-report questionnaire used in this study were only minor.

3 The German EAQ is available online at www.focusonemotions.nl/index.php/emotion-awareness-questionnaire-eaq.

4 Differences were mainly found in items including the word “upset”, which has different possible translations in German. As Dutch and German are closely related languages, and the Dutch version is considered the original EAQ, inconsistencies were resolved by following the wording of the Dutch items.

5 The REQ measurement model has been examined for invariance between boys and girls, finding full metric invariance. Hence, the necessary prerequisite for investigating gender differences has been met.

6 Model 2 has also been calculated as a latent variable model, but as different Heywood cases (negative residual variance of latent variable, standardized factor loading > 1) occurred, a reasonable interpretation was not possible. Therefore, the SDQ subscales were used as manifest variables.

7 Furthermore, scalar measurement invariance—which is a prerequisite for analyzing mean differences—was examined, and partial scalar invariance was found (releasing intercepts of Items 1.3r, 1.5r, 2.3, 3.1r, 3.3r, 4.1r, 4.3, 4.5r, 6.4; Δχ² = 22.98, Δdf = 15, p = .085).

8 Analyses of observed composite differences across groups require full scalar measurement invariance. Because only partial scalar measurement invariance was found, latent mean differences between boys and girls were tested for significance within a multigroup CFA instead (Steinmetz, 2013).

Additional information

Funding

The studies reported in this article were supported by a grant from the German Research Association. (DFG; LO 337/28-1, VI 651/2-1) to the second and third authors.