Developing Age and Gender Adjusted Normative Reference Values for the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS)

Emotion Regulation (ER) is an important aspect of every-day behavior relevant to both clinical and diagnostic practice. To date several studies have investigated the psychometric properties of Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS; Gratz and Roemer 2004 ) scores, however, the extent to whic...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Journal of psychopathology and behavioral assessment 2017-12, Vol.39 (4), p.705-714
Main Authors: Giromini, Luciano, Ales, Francesca, de Campora, Gaia, Zennaro, Alessandro, Pignolo, Claudia
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
Age
Behavioral Science and Psychology
Clinical medicine
Clinical Psychology
Developmental psychology
Emotional regulation
Gender
Personality and Social Psychology
Psychology
Psychopathology
Quantitative psychology
Studies
Values
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Summary:Emotion Regulation (ER) is an important aspect of every-day behavior relevant to both clinical and diagnostic practice. To date several studies have investigated the psychometric properties of Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS; Gratz and Roemer 2004 ) scores, however, the extent to which the DERS is affected by the gender and/or age of the respondents has so far been only poorly investigated. Furthermore, no studies have yet offered suggestions or guidelines on how to interpret different DERS scores. To fill this gap, the current study aimed at: (a) investigating with two relatively large Italian samples the influence of gender and age on DERS scores; (b) introducing a new approach to develop age and gender adjusted normative reference values for the DERS; (c) providing suggestions on how to interpret the resultant, age and gender adjusted, T-transformed, DERS scores. The results of our analyses show that within our first Italian sample ( n  = 808), DERS scores tended to decrease with age, whereas gender had a small impact on them. Moreover, and more importantly, our age and gender adjusted, T-transformed, DERS scores calculated based on this first sample almost perfectly matched the scores produced by a second, independent, nonclinical Italian sample ( n  = 404). Our findings thus support the effectiveness of our method to generate normative reference values for the DERS.
ISSN:0882-2689
1573-3505
DOI:10.1007/s10862-017-9611-0