Abstract
Cognitive emotion regulation plays an important role in how people manage their emotions in
response to stressful life situations. The use of different cognitive emotion regulation
strategies has been linked to several positive and negative psychological effects, including
several forms of psychopathology. The Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ;
Garnefski, Kraaij, & Spinhoven, 2001) was developed to measure the different cognitive
strategies used by people when faced with negative life events, and is the only measure of its
kind to date. Later, a shortened version of the original questionnaire was developed, the
CERQ-short (Garnefski & Kraaij, 2006), which comprise 18 of the original 36 items.
However, the questionnaire was developed in a Western context and, to date, has not been
validated for use within a multicultural, multilingual, non-Westernized population, like South
Africa. Therefore, the aim of this study is to validate the CERQ-short for use within this
context by assessing its psychometric properties using a group of urban South African adults.
The CERQ-short consists of nine scales, namely Self-Blame, Other-Blame, Positive
Reappraisal, Rumination, Catastrophizing, Putting into Perspective, Positive Refocusing,
Acceptance, and Refocus on Planning. Participants (N=1447) were university students who
completed the CERQ-short. Results yielded suitable reliability for most scales, ranging from
.71 to .82, with Rumination, Refocus on Planning, and Putting into Perspective being...
M.A. (Clinical Psychology)