Abstract
The Contextualized Emotion Regulation Survey for Adolescents (CERSA) (Fombouchet et al., 2023) is an advanced self-report psychometric instrument designed to evaluate emotion regulation (ER) strategies and regulatory abilities among adolescents across three discrete, ecologically salient emotion-eliciting scenarios: sadness, fear, and anger. Recognizing that emotional regulation is inherently dynamic and situation-dependent, the CERSA addresses the critical methodological limitation of traditional decontextualized, trait-based instruments that assume regulatory behaviors remain invariant across distinct affective states. The instrument was developed based on established contextual measurement paradigms, including the Negative Emotion Regulation Inventory (NERI; Zimmermann & Iwanski, 2014), capturing both intrinsic and extrinsic processes involved in monitoring, evaluating, and modifying affective reactions. The operational structure comprises 81 items evaluating seven core dimensions: distraction, cognitive reappraisal, expressive suppression, support seeking, rumination, controlling experience, and emotional dysregulation. Evaluated among French middle and high school students aged 12 to 19 years, the CERSA demonstrates robust psychometric properties. Confirmatory factor analyses (CFA) validate a seven-factor architecture for each discrete emotional scenario following the refinement of the distraction dimension, demonstrating excellent fit indices (e.g., CFI ranging from .952 to .962; RMSEA ranging from .044 to .048). Internal consistency is exceptionally high across all contexts, with McDonald’s omega coefficients spanning .827 to .916 for sadness, .830 to .892 for fear, and .830 to .908 for anger. Multi-group CFA further confirms full metric, scalar, and strict measurement invariance across gender, establishing the CERSA as an empirically rigorous instrument for developmental psychology, affective science, and clinical youth assessment.
Keywords
Contextualized Emotion Regulation Survey for Adolescents, CERSA, Emotion Regulation Strategies, Regulatory Abilities, Adolescent Affective Development, Cognitive Reappraisal, Expressive Suppression, Rumination, Emotional Dysregulation, Context-Dependent Assessment, Confirmatory Factor Analysis, Measurement Invariance
Authors
The Contextualized Emotion Regulation Survey for Adolescents was designed and psychometrically validated by researchers affiliated with the Psychology Laboratory (UR 4139, LabPsy) at the University of Bordeaux, France:
- Yoann Fombouchet — Univ. Bordeaux, UR 4139, LabPsy, Bordeaux, France. ORCID: 0000-0002-3018-6331. Email: [email protected]. Correspondence Address: University of Bordeaux, UR 4139, Laboratory of Psychology, 3ter place de la Victoire, F-33076 Bordeaux, France.
- Lyda Lannegrand — Univ. Bordeaux, UR 4139, LabPsy, Bordeaux, France. ORCID: 0000-0002-6388-4806.
- Joanna Lucenet — Univ. Bordeaux, UR 4139, LabPsy, Bordeaux, France.
Purpose
The primary purpose of the Contextualized Emotion Regulation Survey for Adolescents (CERSA) is to capture the granular, situation-specific deployment of emotion regulation strategies and perceived regulatory abilities in youth. Adolescence constitutes a developmental period characterized by heightened emotional reactivity, extensive neurobiological reorganization of frontolimbic circuitry, and emerging vulnerabilities to psychopathology, including mood and anxiety disorders. Historically, the psychometric assessment of adolescent emotion regulation has relied overwhelmingly on trait inventories—such as the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS) or the general Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ)—which prompt respondents to report how they manage negative affect in the abstract. However, theoretical and empirical advances in affective science reveal that regulatory efficacy and strategy selection are profoundly contingent upon contextual features, particularly the specific qualitative nature of the discrete emotion experienced.
The CERSA overcomes decontextualized assessment constraints by embedding strategy evaluation within three explicit vignettes eliciting discrete negative emotions: sadness, fear, and anger. By systematically contrasting these contexts, the instrument serves several pivotal research and clinical objectives:
- Elucidating Situational Divergence: Identifying why and how an adolescent may successfully deploy adaptive strategies (e.g., reappraisal) when experiencing sadness, yet default to maladaptive actions (e.g., dysregulation, expressive suppression) when confronted with anger or fear.
- Differentiating Strategies from Perceived Abilities: Measuring not only whether a behavioral or cognitive strategy is utilized, but whether the adolescent feels competent in actively controlling the emotional experience and executing regulatory goals.
- Informing Targeted Developmental Interventions: Assisting clinical psychologists, school counselors, and psychiatric practitioners in pinpointing emotion-specific regulatory deficits, thereby tailoring interventions (such as Dialectical Behavior Therapy for Adolescents or Cognitive Behavioral Therapy) to the precise emotional contexts that precipitate psychological distress.
- Advancing Regulatory Flexibility Models: Providing an empirical operationalization of regulatory flexibility, examining whether adolescents dynamically adapt their regulatory repertoire to match environmental demands and emotional affordances.
Psychological Construct
The CERSA conceptualizes emotion regulation as a multi-component process comprising the extrinsic and intrinsic mechanisms through which an individual monitors, evaluates, and alters emotional trajectory, duration, and intensity to attain personal goals. The instrument measures seven distinct regulatory dimensions across the contexts of sadness, fear, and anger:
1. Distraction
Distraction involves the active deployment of attentional control away from the emotion-eliciting event toward neutral or positively valenced alternative stimuli or tasks. Within the CERSA, distraction reflects both behavioral disengagement (e.g., engaging in an alternative physical activity) and cognitive shift (e.g., deliberately focusing on unrelated pleasant thoughts) to rapidly attenuate immediate affective intensity.
2. Cognitive Reappraisal
Cognitive reappraisal represents an antecedent-focused cognitive strategy wherein the adolescent alters their semantic interpretation of the emotion-eliciting situation. This involves reframing an event to modify its emotional impact, identifying silver linings, contextualizing challenges within a developmental framework, or actively reappraising personal responsibility and potential outcomes.
3. Expressive Suppression
Expressive suppression is a response-focused regulatory strategy centered on the deliberate inhibition of external emotional expressive behaviors. Although facial, vocal, or postural expressions are restrained, the internal subjective physiological and psychological experience of the emotion often persists or intensifies, leading to potential social alienation or physiological wear.
4. Support Seeking
Support seeking encompasses interpersonal or socially-mediated emotion regulation. It captures the degree to which an adolescent reaches out to familial, peer, or institutional attachment figures to solicit emotional validation, comfort, advice, or instrumental problem-solving assistance in response to an acute emotional stressor.
5. Rumination
Rumination represents a preservative, repetitive cognitive process characterized by focusing involuntarily on one’s internal distress, the causes of the emotional disturbance, and its potential negative consequences. Unlike structured reflective problem-solving, rumination within the CERSA captures unproductive cognitive loops that maintain or exacerbate dysphoric, anxious, or hostile states.
6. Controlling Experience
Controlling experience assesses perceived regulatory self-efficacy and subjective mastery over internal emotional states. This dimension measures the adolescent’s perceived capacity to modulate the subjective feeling state, prevent affective escalation, and regain emotional equilibrium through deliberate internal effort.
7. Emotional Dysregulation
Emotional dysregulation measures the breakdown or failure of regulatory attempts, resulting in uncontrollable emotional cascades, behavioral disinhibition, affective flooding, and expressions that disrupt interpersonal relations or personal goals. It captures the adolescent’s subjective experience of being overpowered by sadness, fear, or anger.
Theoretical Framework
The CERSA is grounded in two primary theoretical foundations: the Process Model of Emotion Regulation formulated by James J. Gross (1998, 2015) and contemporary models of Regulatory Flexibility and Contextual Emotion Regulation (Bonanno & Burton, 2013; Aldao, 2013).
Gross’s Process Model posits that emotions unfold over time along a situational trajectory: Situation → Attention → Appraisal → Response. Regulatory strategies operate at specific intervals along this timeline:
- Attentional Deployment: Exemplified by distraction, altering the mental focus within the active situation.
- Cognitive Change: Exemplified by reappraisal, modifying appraisals before emotional responses fully crystallize.
- Response Modulation: Exemplified by expressive suppression, dampening overt behavioral outputs once emotional responses have been generated.
Crucially, traditional applications of the Process Model often treated strategies as inherently “adaptive” (e.g., cognitive reappraisal) or “maladaptive” (e.g., expressive suppression). Contemporary affective theory challenges this heuristic, asserting that no regulatory strategy is uniformly adaptive across all situations. The contextual approach emphasizes that emotional affordances vary significantly by discrete emotion:
- Anger is an approach-oriented, high-arousal emotion typically elicited by boundary violations, perceived injustice, or goal obstruction. Regulatory mechanisms must address high autonomic arousal and impulses toward confrontation.
- Fear is an avoidance-oriented, high-arousal emotion triggered by imminent threat, requiring immediate security restoration or anxiety reduction.
- Sadness is a low-arousal, withdrawal-oriented emotion resulting from irrevocable loss or failure, often benefiting from relational support seeking and gentle cognitive reframing rather than rapid behavioral avoidance.
Developmentally, adolescence represents a phase wherein executive functions, top-down prefrontal inhibitory control, and social-cognitive sensitivity undergo marked maturation. By formalizing contextual differentiation, the CERSA directly reflects developmental psychopathology frameworks, evaluating whether an adolescent possesses a nuanced regulatory repertoire or exhibits rigid, context-blind regulatory tendencies.
Validity
The validity of the CERSA was established through extensive psychometric testing across multiple academic cohorts of French secondary school students (Fombouchet, Lannegrand, & Lucenet, 2023):
Construct and Convergent Validity
Construct validity was evaluated by correlating CERSA strategy and ability subscale scores with validated dimensions from the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ; Garnefski et al., 2001). Across all three situational contexts (sadness, fear, anger):
- CERSA Reappraisal showed robust positive correlations with the CERQ Positive Reappraisal and Putting into Perspective subscales (moderate to strong effect sizes, r = .40 to .65, p < .001).
- CERSA Rumination converged strongly with the CERQ Rumination subscale across sadness and fear scenarios (r = .50 to .68, p < .001).
- CERSA Dysregulation correlated positively with CERQ Catastrophizing and Other-blame, validating its sensitivity to maladaptive emotional processing.
- CERSA Support Seeking and Controlling Experience exhibited convergent patterns with relevant active coping indicators and negative associations with depressive affect.
Situational Divergence and Discriminant Validity
The data demonstrated substantial intra-individual variance across the three emotional contexts. For instance, endorsement rates and structural associations for expressive suppression and distraction shifted meaningfully depending on whether the adolescent was responding to sadness versus anger. This confirmed that the CERSA does not merely measure a monolithic trait, but captures meaningful contextual variance that trait scales overlook.
Reliability
Internal consistency of the CERSA subscales was evaluated using McDonald’s omega (ω), which provides a more robust and less biased estimation of composite reliability than Cronbach’s alpha under conditions of congeneric measurement models.
The reliability analyses confirmed good to excellent internal consistency across all subscales within each emotional context:
- Sadness Situations: McDonald’s ω coefficients ranged from .827 to .916 across the seven dimensions.
- Fear Situations: McDonald’s ω coefficients ranged from .830 to .892.
- Anger Situations: McDonald’s ω coefficients ranged from .830 to .908.
All values comfortably exceed the conventional psychometric threshold of .70 for research instruments and .80 for clinical assessment tools, confirming minimal measurement error within each situational domain.
Factor Analysis
The dimensional architecture of the CERSA was examined via rigorous Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) conducted independently for each emotional condition (sadness, fear, and anger), testing the hypothesized seven-factor model:
Model Fit and Item Refinement
Preliminary model estimations indicated localized strain within the distraction factor due to item redundancy. Following the systematic removal of one problematic item from the distraction dimension, the seven-factor structure demonstrated exceptional goodness-of-fit indices across all three emotional conditions:
- Sadness Model: χ²(303) = 764.865, p < .001; χ²/df = 2.524; Comparative Fit Index (CFI) = .955; Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) = .950; Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) = .047 [90% CI: .042–.051]; Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) = .049.
- Fear Model: χ²(303) = 778.494, p < .001; χ²/df = 2.569; CFI = .952; TLI = .947; RMSEA = .048 [90% CI: .044–.052]; SRMR = .049.
- Anger Model: χ²(303) = 684.902, p < .001; χ²/df = 2.260; CFI = .962; TLI = .957; RMSEA = .044 [90% CI: .040–.048]; SRMR = .046.
Measurement Invariance Across Gender
To ensure that the CERSA measures emotional regulation constructs identically across male and female adolescents, multi-group confirmatory factor analyses were conducted within each emotion scenario:
- Configural Invariance: Established identical unconstrained factor structures across gender groups.
- Metric (Weak) Invariance: Constraining factor loadings across groups resulted in non-significant changes in model fit (ΔCFI ≤ .010, ΔRMSEA ≤ .015), confirming that scale metrics are equivalent between genders.
- Scalar (Strong) Invariance: Constraining item intercepts across groups preserved acceptable model fit criteria, justifying latent mean comparisons between adolescent boys and girls.
- Strict Invariance: Constraining uniqueness/residual variances across groups indicated full residual invariance, demonstrating that measurement error properties do not vary systematically by gender.
Instrument / Measurement Tool
The CERSA is a structured self-report survey organized into three situational vignettes corresponding to distinct negative emotional experiences.
- Instrument Name: Contextualized Emotion Regulation Survey for Adolescents (CERSA)
- Authors: Yoann Fombouchet, Lyda Lannegrand, and Joanna Lucenet (2023)
- Target Population: Adolescents and youth aged 12 to 19 years (applicable across middle school, high school, and early college populations)
- Administration Format: Standardized paper-and-pencil or digital self-administered questionnaire
- Structural Framework: Three modular scenarios presenting contextualized triggers for: (1) Sadness, (2) Fear, and (3) Anger.
- Vignette-Level Assessment:
- Situational Frequency: Rated on a 3-point Likert-type scale:
Never(1),Once(2),Multiple times(3). - Emotional Intensity: Rated on a 7-point Likert-type scale ranging from
1 = Not at allto7 = Really intense.
- Situational Frequency: Rated on a 3-point Likert-type scale:
- Item Count: 81 total items distributed across the three emotional contexts.
- Response Scales for Strategy & Ability Items:
- Strategy Items: Rated on a 7-point Likert-type scale ranging from
1 = Not at all like thatto7 = Totally like that. - Ability Items: Rated on a 7-point Likert-type scale ranging from
1 = Not like me at allto7 = Totally like me.
- Strategy Items: Rated on a 7-point Likert-type scale ranging from
- Subscale Dimensions (7 factors per emotional context):
- Distraction
- Reappraisal
- Expressive Suppression
- Support Seeking
- Rumination
- Controlling Experience
- Dysregulation
- Scoring Guidelines: Subscale scores are derived by calculating the mean or sum of items within each of the 7 factors for each discrete emotion (Sadness, Fear, Anger). Higher scores on Distraction, Reappraisal, Expressive Suppression, Support Seeking, and Rumination indicate greater situational utilization of that strategy. Higher scores on Controlling Experience reflect greater perceived regulatory self-efficacy, while higher scores on Dysregulation denote more severe breakdowns in emotional equilibrium.
Permissions & Fee and Test Year
The Contextualized Emotion Regulation Survey for Adolescents was published in 2023 by Yoann Fombouchet, Lyda Lannegrand, and Joanna Lucenet.
- Permissions: The instrument is protected by academic copyright. Researchers, psychologists, and clinicians wishing to utilize the complete French inventory or obtain official translated materials must contact the corresponding author, Dr. Yoann Fombouchet (Univ. Bordeaux, UR 4139, LabPsy; Email: [email protected]).
- Fee: There are no commercial fees or royalties charged for academic, non-commercial research, or pedagogical applications of the instrument.
- Availability: The original empirical validation paper was published in the British Journal of Developmental Psychology (https://doi.org/10.1111/bjdp.12450).
References
- Aldao, A. (2013). The future of emotion regulation research: Capturing context. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8(2), 155–172. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691612459518
- Bonanno, G. A., & Burton, C. L. (2013). Regulatory flexibility: An individual differences perspective on coping and emotion regulation. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 8(6), 591–612. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691613504116
- Fombouchet, Y., Lannegrand, L., & Lucenet, J. (2023). The Contextualized Emotion Regulation Survey for Adolescents (CERSA): How does emotion regulation vary according to context? British Journal of Developmental Psychology, 41(3), 306–323. https://doi.org/10.1111/bjdp.12450
- Garnefski, N., Kraaij, V., & Spinhoven, P. (2001). Negative life events, cognitive emotion regulation and emotional problems. Personality and Individual Differences, 30(8), 1311–1327. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0191-8869(00)00113-6
- Gross, J. J. (1998). The emerging field of emotion regulation: An integrative review. Review of General Psychology, 2(3), 271–299. https://doi.org/10.1037/1089-2680.2.3.271
- Gross, J. J. (2015). Emotion regulation: Current status and future prospects. Psychological Inquiry, 26(1), 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/1047840X.2014.940781
- Zimmermann, P., & Iwanski, A. (2014). Emotion regulation from early adolescence to emerging adulthood and middle adulthood: Age differences, gender differences, and emotion-specific developmental variations. International Journal of Behavioral Development, 38(2), 182–194. https://doi.org/10.1177/0165025413515405