ERQ: ten questions about how you handle emotions
Two people get the same bad news on the same morning. One reframes it, decides it is survivable, and gets on with the afternoon. The other feels it fully and shows nothing on their face. Gross and John built the ERQ in 2003 to separate those two habits, because the strategies have different consequences even when the emotion is identical.
Ten statements, rated 1 to 7. Six cover cognitive reappraisal, which means changing what you think about a situation in order to change what it makes you feel. Four cover expressive suppression, which means feeling the emotion and keeping it off your face. Nothing is reverse-scored, and there is no total score. Adding the two scales together throws away the point of the test.
| Scale | Items | What it measures |
|---|---|---|
| Cognitive reappraisal | 1, 3, 5, 7, 8, 10 | Changing your thinking about a situation to change its emotional impact |
| Expressive suppression | 2, 4, 6, 9 | Holding back the outward expression of an emotion you are already feeling |
Why the two scores stay separate
The factors are close to independent. Correlations between them land around 0.10 to 0.20 across studies, which means someone can be high on both, low on both, or high on one and low on the other. A single number would hide the pattern that carries the information. What matters is your reappraisal mean next to your suppression mean, and where each sits against a sample you belong to.
Reliability
The original study reported alpha .79 for reappraisal and .73 for suppression, with three-month retest reliability of .69 for both. The Chinese version (Wang and colleagues, 2007, 1163 university students) reported 0.85 and 0.77, three-week retest of 0.82 and 0.79, and a two-factor model that fit well (CFI 0.96, RMSEA 0.085).
What each strategy predicts
Reappraisal goes with better relationships, higher life satisfaction and fewer depressive symptoms. Suppression goes the other way: weaker social support, lower satisfaction and more depressive symptoms. Factor analysis supports the two-factor structure, and it holds across genders.
Culture complicates the second one. In East Asian samples suppression scores run higher than in Western ones, and high suppression does not carry the same cost. Keeping a feeling off your face functions differently where group harmony outranks self-expression, so comparing a Chinese score against American norms will mislead.
Limits
The ERQ measures tendencies, not what you did last Tuesday, and it is a self-report, so social desirability comes along. The reappraisal items are the more flattering of the two sets, which may inflate them slightly. There is no clinical cutoff and no diagnosis at the end of it. If suppression is costing you relationships or sleep, that is a conversation for a therapist rather than a score. This page is not a diagnosis and does not replace one.