Psychometric properties of the Brazilian version of the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS)

Introduction: Emotion regulation can be defined as the process by which individuals manage their emotional experience. It has been demonstrated that deficits in this ability are associated with various psychiatric disorders. In this direction, the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS) was developed to measure difficulties in emotion regulation . Objective: To examine the psychometric properties of the Brazilian Portuguese version of the DERS. Method: A total of 377 individuals from the general population, selected by convenience, completed a sociodemographic form, the adapted Brazilian Portuguese DERS and the Depression Anxiety Stress Scale (DASS-21). Factor structure, reliability, and concurrent validity of the adapted version of the instrument were investigated. Results: The confirmatory factor analysis replicated the six-factor structure originally proposed for the instrument and confirmed the acceptability of a hierarchical model where all DERS subscales loaded on a general emotion dysregulation factor. Internal consistency indicators had adequate values for the general factor and subscales. The positive association between DERS and DASS-21 scores supports the instrument’s concurrent validity. Conclusion: These results suggest that the Brazilian version of the DERS is reliable both as a general measure of difficulties in emotion regulation and as a measure of the constituents of this construct. Future research should investigate the psychometric properties of the scale in clinical and nonclinical populations, with equal gender proportions and diverse backgrounds, and preferably employing longitudinal designs.


Introduction
Emotion regulation can be defined as the process by which individuals influence which emotions they have, when they have them, and how they experience and express these emotions. [1][2][3] Emotion regulation may decrease, increase, or simply maintain emotional response, depending on an individual's goals. Since deficits in this ability are associated with various psychiatric disorders, it can be considered to be a transdiagnostic process. 4 Difficulties in emotion regulation are present in several forms of psychopathology such as eating disorders, substance abuse, anxiety, mood, and personality disorders. 1,[4][5][6][7][8] Therefore, successful emotion regulation seems to be a prerequisite for adaptive functioning. 3 The emotion regulatory process of an individual may be automatic or controlled, conscious or unconscious and involve extrinsic and intrinsic processes responsible for monitoring, evaluating, and modifying emotional reactions. 3,9 This process is also described as one of the several forms of affect regulation, which means an attempt to alter some aspect of the interaction between the individual and the environment. 3 In 2004, Gratz & Roemer, 10 10 The authors of the scale conducted an exploratory factor analysis to examine its factor structure and results showed that emotion regulation was better described including six dimensions instead of four. In the end of their preliminary study, Gratz & Roemer 10 presented limitations that they suggested should be The DERS scale was adapted and had its psychometric properties investigated in several countries, e.g., Italy, 14 Portugal, 15 Turkey, 16 Greece, 17 Chile, 18 Argentina, 19 and Brazil. 11 Generally, these adaptations have confirmed the six-factor structure proposed by the original authors.
Nonetheless, Bardeen et al. 20 advocated for testing a hierarchical factor structure, which would provide more consistent evidence for using total DERS scores as a measure of general difficulties in emotion regulation.
In this case, higher-order confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) would address the hypothesis that a general factor accounts for the correlations among lower-order factors of the scale. Testing a hierarchical factor also allows one to determine the relative importance of each subscale to the general factor. Such an approach has not yet been applied to the study of the factor structure of the Brazilian DERS.
To date, the issues presented have not been

Translated instrument
The authors sought to develop an adaptation of the DERS to Brazilian Portuguese in line with the guidelines of the International Test Committee for adapting psychometric tests. 21 Various procedures were adopted to investigate whether the concepts could be transposed to the new context and culture in which it was intended to be used. 22

Participants
The sample comprised 377 individuals from the general population who anonymously completed selfreport questionnaires and a sociodemographic form.
Participants' age ranged from 18 to 66 years, with a mean age of 33.9 (standard deviation = 10.4). Seventy percent (n = 267) of these participants were female and the majority of the sample had at least some college education (n = 328, 87%). Participants did not receive any financial compensation for participation.

Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS)
The DERS is a 36-item self-report scale measuring difficulties in emotion regulation.

Sample characteristics
The majority of the sample was female, with postsecondary education or higher and with high income (Table 1).

Factor structure
A single-factor baseline model was generated to serve    Table 2 shows fit measures for all tested models. Path diagrams with standardized loadings and error variances for both models are available as online-only supplementary material (Appendices 2 and 3).
The correlations among all six subscales in the firstorder model are shown in Table 3

Reliability
The results indicated that the instrument has a very high internal consistency, with an alpha of 0.94 for the overall scale, ranging from 0.79 to 0.88 on subscales.
Additionally, composite reliability and average variance extracted by factor were computed in order to determine the reliability of each subscale while accounting for different item loadings and error estimates provided by the CFA. 30 Table 4 presents reliability measures for all subscales and for the total scale.

Concurrent validity
The DASS-21 scale was used in this study to assess concurrent validity due to its hypothesized relationship with emotion regulation. Correlations among DERS and DASS-21 subscales were statistically significant and moderate to high in magnitude. Nonparametric correlation coefficients are shown in Table 5.
As shown in

Discussion
The aim of the present study was to further investigate the factorial structure, internal consistency, and concurrent validity of a Brazilian version of the DERS. The original scale was translated and  it is possible to interpret evidence gathered here as supporting the multidimensional model proposed by The present study found that the awareness subscale correlated with the other subscales with slightly higher values than the ones presented by Miguel

Conclusion
This study examined additional psychometric properties