Assessing Emotion Regulation across Asian and Western Cultures: Psychometric Properties of Three Common Scales across Singaporean and Australian Samples

Abstract

Given the differences in emotion regulation across cultures, it is paramount to ensure that measures of emotion regulation measure the same construct and that conceptualizations of emotion regulation are valid across cultures. Therefore, the present study assessed the measurement invariance (alongside other psychometric properties) of three popular emotion regulation questionnaires, the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ), Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS), and the Perth Emotion Regulation Competency Inventory (PERCI), across 434 Singaporeans and 489 Australians. Our study showed that all three questionnaires were measurement invariant, had excellent internal consistency, and relatively good concurrent validity with psychopathology and alexithymia across our Singaporean and Australian sample, justifying their use in comparing Asian and Western cultures. Our findings suggest that measures of emotion regulation have utility across both individualistic and collectivistic cultures. Our findings supports the use of these measures in cross-cultural research and provides support for the utility for personality assessments across cultures.

Acknowledgments

The authors sincerely thank the participants for taking the time out to participate in this study and any enquiries can be made to the first author.

Author contributions

We report how we determined our sample size, all data exclusions, all manipulations, and all measures in the study.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Research Training Program scholarship provided to the first author by University of Western Australia, which is funded by the Australian government.