Overview

Emotion dysregulation often emerges early in development and is a core feature of many psychological conditions. The Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS) is a well validated and widely used self-report measure for assessing emotion regulation problems among adolescents and adults. The DERS has six subscales with five to eight items each (36 total) .A substantial body of research has shown significant positive associations between scores on the DERS (specifically the total score) and symptoms of a range of psychological disorders, including borderline personality disorder (Gratz et al., 2006), generalized anxiety disorder (Mennin et al., 2002), substance use disorders (Fox et al., 2007; Gratz and Tull, 2010), social anxiety (Rusch et al., 2012), health anxiety (Bardeen and Fergus, 2014), post-traumatic stress disorder (Ehring and Quack, 2010), and bipolar disorder (Becerra et al., 2013; Van Rheenen et al., 2015). The DERS short form (DERS-SF) instrument maintains the excellent psychometric properties and retains the total and subscale scores of the original measure with half the items.