Gender invariance and psychometric properties of a Brazilian version of the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ)

Abstract Introduction Emotion regulation refers to use of strategies to change or suppress a response to an affective experience and is an important component of an individual’s subjective wellbeing. Difficulties properly regulating emotions are related to psychopathological processes. Objective This study assessed the factor structure of the Brazilian version of the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ); the invariance of its psychometric parameters as a function of gender; and its convergent validity with other scales measuring affective processes. Method A total of 813 adults (73.7% women), aged between 18 and 64 years and with a high educational level used an electronic platform to complete the ERQ, the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS), the Affect Scale (AS), and the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS). Factor structure, reliability, and validity of the adapted version of the ERQ were investigated. Results Multi-group confirmatory factor analysis (MGCFA) revealed adequate goodness of fit for the ERQ’s two-factor model (cognitive reappraisal and emotional suppression), providing evidence of invariance of its psychometric parameters as a function of gender. Correlations between the ERQ’s factors and measures of affect and emotional dysregulation presented positive indicators, with significant associations between emotion regulation and affective experiences depending on gender. Conclusion The ERQ presents good psychometric indicators for use with the Brazilian population.


Introduction
Emotion regulation is essential for individuals to adapt properly to changes in the environment. Emotional self-regulation can be understood as a set of cognitive and/or behavioral strategies used to control emotional experiences, whether before an emotion emerges or even when an emotion is already in course. 1 Difficulties controlling one's own emotions underlie negative emotional experiences and various psychological disorders. Of note, studies addressing social anxiety, personality disorder, and post-traumatic stress disorder have related such difficulties to duration, frequency, and types of emotions. 2,3 Social risk behaviors are also related to emotion regulation 4 and vary over the course of life according to individuals' gender and diverse cultural contexts. [5][6][7] A great variety of psychological strategies are used to balance the influence of emotion in each social context or even to modify an emotional experience entirely.
These strategies are commonly grouped into two large categories: "antecedent strategies", which focus on behaviors that precede the emergence of emotion, and "response-focused" strategies, the objective of which is to control an emotional experience already in course. 3,8 According to Gross 3,9 there are at least five groups of emotion regulation strategies that differ in terms of the process used to modulate affective responses or the point during the affective process at which they are implemented.

Gross & John 1 developed the Emotion Regulation
Questionnaire (ERQ) to assess individual differences related to the use of emotion regulation strategies, assessing one antecedent process (called cognitive reappraisal) and one response-focused emotion modulation process (expressive suppression). This instrument has been adapted for Germany, Italy, United Kingdom, Australia, and Spain, among a total of more than 15 countries, including Brazil. [10][11][12][13][14] Studies addressing the ERQ report that, in common with positive and negative affect, which presents differences according to gender, 15,16 different emotion regulation strategies may also be associated with a person's gender. These differences are reported in the original study conducted by Gross & John 1 and have been found in other cultural contexts. 5,17,18 The findings reported so far show that socio-cultural expectations play an important role, influencing the behavioral style of emotional self-regulation among men, favoring expressive suppression strategies. 1 The authors did not find differences between men and women regarding the use of cognitive reappraisal as an emotion regulation strategy. Later, in a large cross-cultural study involving 23 countries and 3,386 participants, Matsumoto et al. 6 found the same emotion regulation patterns based on gender; i.e., men used emotional suppression more frequently than women.
However, in a recent study with 5,000 participants from In the Brazilian setting, the ERQ was translated by Boian et al. 13  Likewise, expressive suppression is expected to be significantly related to negative affect and inversely related to positive affect. Considering that emotional suppression is a late strategy of emotion regulation, that is, it is implemented when the affect is already present, individuals using it are expected to experience negative affect. Empirical evidence shows that this strategy (expressive suppression) is ineffective at modifying an existing emotion. 1,31 An additional hypothesis that is tested in this study concerns a potential poor correlation between use of emotion regulation strategies and presence of affect dysregulation, according to information provided by the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS). 32 According to John & Eng, 10 even though these are apparently similar phenomena, or even opposed phenomena, 6 emotion dysregulation (assessed using the DERS) is related to diversified processes, which are not always directly linked to cognitive reappraisal or expressive suppression strategies and may thus be considered different phenomena. Recent studies have shown a poor correlation between ERQ and DERS indicators, which provides evidence that they deal with different processes. 18,33 This hypothesis, if confirmed, would contribute to evidence of the ERQ's discriminant validity in Brazilian samples.

Materials and method
This is an empirical study with a cross-sectional, descriptive, and inter-group comparative design. The PANAS is a self-report instrument on which respondents are asked to report how intensely

Results
The two independent factor model proposed by the authors of the original ERQ was tested first. The results of the confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) are illustrated in Figure 1. Next, the relationships between ERQ factors and affect variables, related to positive and negative affect, and also between ERQ factors and emotion dysregulation variables, were assessed. These findings are presented in Table 2.
The results indicate positive and statistically significant associations between the ERQ's cognitive

Discussion
The main objective of this study was to investigate the psychometric properties and invariance of the ERQ parameters in a Brazilian sample, testing the potential influence of participants' gender. We also investigated evidence of validity and accuracy estimates of the ERQ at a national level.  argue that while the DERS focuses on skills (more precisely, the absence of skills) to assess an individual's competence in regulating emotions, the ERQ focuses on two strategies that can be used on a daily basis (reappraisal and expressive suppression), not linked to any specific context. In short, the results concerning the ERQ and DERS present evidence of validity.

Final considerations
The objective of this study was to assess the psychometric qualities of the ERQ and its invariance in respect to the respondents' gender for a Brazilian sample.
The results show that the two-factor structure proposed