State Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (S-DERS)

1. Abstract

The State Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (S-DERS) is a psychometrically validated, 21-item self-report instrument developed to assess acute, momentary fluctuations in emotional dysregulation. While its parent instrument, the original Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS) developed by Gratz and Roemer (2004), measures cross-situational, trait-level deficits in emotional processing and modulation, the S-DERS was constructed by Lavender, Tull, DiLillo, Messman-Moore, and Gratz (2017) to capture dynamic, real-time responses to distressing emotional states. The scale comprises four correlated subscales: Nonacceptance (evaluative distress and negative secondary reactions to current feelings), Modulate (perceived inability to control behaviors and reduce the intensity or duration of acute emotional arousal), Awareness (inattention to emotional cues, reverse-scored), and Clarity (difficulty identifying and labeling discrete emotions in the present moment). Respondents rate each statement based on how they feel “right now” using a 5-point Likert scale ranging from 1 (Not at all) to 5 (Completely). Psychometric investigations establish high internal consistency (overall Cronbach’s α ≥ .92; subscale α values ranging from .78 to .91), robust structural validity confirmed via exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, and significant convergent validity with indices of acute negative affect, state distress, and physiological reactivity. The S-DERS is uniquely suited for experimental psychopathology paradigms, laboratory-based emotion inductions, ecological momentary assessment (EMA), and tracking immediate pre-to-post-session therapeutic interventions.

2. Keywords

State Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale, S-DERS, emotion regulation, emotion dysregulation, state affect, ecological momentary assessment, psychometrics, affective science, nonacceptance, emotional clarity

3. Authors

The State Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale was developed and validated by an interdisciplinary team of clinical psychologists and affective science researchers:

• Jason M. Lavender, Ph.D. – Department of Psychiatry, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA; Military Health System / The Metis Foundation, San Antonio, TX, USA.
• Matthew T. Tull, Ph.D. – Department of Psychology, University of Toledo, Toledo, OH, USA.
• David DiLillo, Ph.D. – Department of Psychology, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Lincoln, NE, USA.
• Terri L. Messman-Moore, Ph.D. – Department of Psychology, Miami University, Oxford, OH, USA.
• Kim L. Gratz, Ph.D. – Department of Psychology, University of Toledo, Toledo, OH, USA.

Corresponding author inquiries regarding the initial scale development may be directed to Dr. Jason M. Lavender via academic and institutional channels.

4. Purpose

Emotion regulation is fundamentally dynamic, characterized by rapid changes across seconds, minutes, and hours in response to shifting situational demands, interpersonal exchanges, and internal cognitive appraisals. Although the dispositional tendency to experience emotion regulation deficits has been extensively researched using the original 36-item Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale, trait scales are explicitly designed to capture aggregated, general, or cross-situational patterns over extended intervals (e.g., “almost never” to “almost always”). Consequently, trait measures suffer from retrospective recall biases and demonstrate insensitivity to acute experimental manipulations or fine-grained temporal dynamics.

The primary purpose of the S-DERS is to provide researchers and clinicians with a reliable, theoretically coherent, and structurally validated measure of state-level emotion dysregulation. The scale assesses the exact difficulties an individual is encountering regarding their affective experience at the present moment. This temporal shift from dispositional attribution to momentary status serves several critical empirical and clinical functions:

• Laboratory Affective Inductions: It allows researchers to quantify immediate, transient increases in emotion dysregulation following experimental stressors (e.g., the Trier Social Stress Test), trauma-cue exposures, sad or distressing film clips, frustration-inducing cognitive tasks, or interpersonal conflict paradigms.
• Ecological Momentary Assessment (EMA): The instrument can be integrated into ambulatory monitoring protocols delivered via smartphones, capturing within-person fluctuations in emotion regulation in naturalistic contexts following specific daily stressors or social interactions.
• Clinical Monitoring and Micro-Interventions: Clinicians administering evidence-based treatments such as Dialectical Behavior Therapy (DBT) or Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) can administer the S-DERS immediately before and after individual therapy sessions, exposure exercises, or mindfulness inductions to measure real-time improvements in affective tolerance and modulation.

5. Psychological Construct

The construct of emotion dysregulation measured by the S-DERS is conceptualized as a multi-component, integrative failure to accept, modulate, comprehend, and direct responses to acute emotional states. In contrast to the original six-factor trait model, factor-analytic investigations of state responding revealed that individuals experiencing heightened distress in the moment conceptualize their difficulties along four interrelated dimensions:

1. Nonacceptance of Current Emotional States

This dimension assesses secondary negative emotional reactions to primary feelings. Rather than simply experiencing distress, individuals with high nonacceptance display meta-emotional invalidation, judging themselves harshly, experiencing shame, guilt, embarrassment, or anger because of how they feel. For example, an individual experiencing acute anxiety might endorse items reflecting self-contempt or weakness (e.g., “I feel ashamed with myself for feeling this way” and “I feel like I’m a weak person for feeling this way”). This construct is central to models of experiential avoidance and emotional cascades.

2. Modulate (Difficulties Modulating Emotional and Behavioral Responses)

The Modulate subscale collapses elements of impulse control, goal-directed functioning, and affective management into a unified state-level construct. In the heat of acute distress, behavioral dyscontrol, cognitive disruption, and perceived affective uncontrollability occur concurrently. This factor captures perceived inability to pursue goal-oriented tasks, subjective loss of control, fear of escalating distress, and perceived helplessness regarding emotional trajectory (e.g., “I am having difficulty controlling my behaviors”, “I feel out of control”, and “I believe that I will continue feeling this way for a long time”).

3. Emotional Awareness

The Awareness dimension captures the extent to which an individual attends to and acknowledges their emotional experiences as they unfold. In the S-DERS, all items indexing awareness are framed positively and reverse-scored to indicate deficit. Low awareness manifests as affective numbness, emotional dissociation, or active cognitive minimization (e.g., failing to endorse statements such as “I am paying attention to how I feel” or “I believe that my feelings are valid and important”). Without conscious attention to affective signals, adaptive regulatory selection cannot be engaged.

4. Emotional Clarity

The Clarity subscale evaluates the degree to which an individual knows and comprehends the specific nature of their emotional experience. In moments of high arousal, emotional differentiation can break down, leading to diffuse, undifferentiated distress. High scores on this subscale reflect substantial emotional confusion and difficulty discriminating between distinct emotional qualities (e.g., “I have no idea how I am feeling” and “I am confused about how I feel”).

6. Theoretical Framework

The S-DERS is rooted in the multidimensional conceptual framework of emotion regulation formulated by Gratz and Roemer (2004), further contextualized by James Gross’s Process Model of Emotion Regulation and Linehan’s (1993) biosocial theory of emotional vulnerability. Traditional clinical perspectives frequently mischaracterized emotion regulation as merely down-regulating negative valence or dampening physiological arousal. In contrast, Gratz and Roemer established that adaptive regulation involves:

1. Awareness and comprehension of emotional states;
2. Acceptance of affective experiences rather than experiential avoidance or self-punitive appraisals;
3. Ability to inhibit impulsive, dysregulated behaviors and remain goal-directed in the presence of negative affect; and
4. Flexible use of situationally appropriate strategies to modulate the intensity and duration of emotional responses.

The theoretical leap from trait to state, operationalized by Lavender et al. (2017), incorporates state-trait personality theory (Cattell, Spielberger). Under this model, an individual may possess a baseline trait vulnerability (e.g., general difficulty tolerating distress), but their instantaneous state of dysregulation is dynamically driven by the interaction between that disposition and immediate contextual demands, interpersonal triggers, cognitive loads, and physiological fatigue. When emotional arousal surges, regulatory resources are strained; the S-DERS provides the empirical bridge enabling researchers to monitor these dynamic regulatory breakdowns in real time.

7. Validity

Empirical evaluations of the S-DERS have provided extensive support for its construct, convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validity across non-clinical, clinical, and experimental samples:

Construct and Factorial Validity

Lavender et al. (2017) conducted structural analyses in a primary development sample of 484 young adult women (aged 18–25). Exploratory factor analyses (EFA) demonstrated that a four-factor solution cleanly organized the state-adapted items, successfully resolving cross-loadings that emerge when attempting to force a 6-factor trait model onto momentary emotional states. Confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) supported the superiority of this 4-factor correlated structure over unidimensional models, with robust goodness-of-fit indices (CFI > .93, RMSEA ≤ .06).

Convergent and Concurrent Validity

The S-DERS exhibits robust, statistically significant correlations with established constructs of affective vulnerability:

• Trait Emotion Dysregulation: S-DERS total and subscale scores correlate significantly and positively with corresponding dimensions of the parent 36-item DERS ($r = .45$ to $.65$, $p < .001$), demonstrating that while trait vulnerability informs state states, substantial unique variance remains attributable to momentary fluctuations.
• State Negative Affect: The scale correlates strongly with the Negative Affect scale of the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS) ($r pprox .50 ext{–}.70$), confirming that momentary emotional difficulty covaries with real-time distress.
• Psychopathology Indices: Significant positive associations are found with measures of borderline personality features, depressive symptoms, post-traumatic stress severity, and anxiety sensitivity.

Discriminant Validity

The S-DERS displays negligible or weak negative correlations with trait positive affectivity and state positive affect on the PANAS ($r = -.10$ to $-.25$), confirming that the scale is not simply capturing general psychological engagement or nonspecific emotional arousal, but specifically indices dysregulated negative affect.

Experimental and Criterion-Related Validity

Experimental studies using behavioral distress tasks (e.g., mirror-tracing persistence tasks, breath-holding paradigms, and carbon dioxide challenge tests) demonstrate that S-DERS scores elevate significantly post-stressor compared to baseline. Furthermore, momentary elevations in S-DERS predict immediate maladaptive coping behaviors, such as impulsive decision-making, urges to engage in self-injury, and substance cravings in laboratory settings.

8. Reliability

The S-DERS demonstrates exceptional reliability across multiple independent empirical investigations:

Internal Consistency

In the seminal validation study by Lavender et al. (2017) ($N = 484$), the total scale and its individual subscales demonstrated robust internal consistency, as quantified by Cronbach’s alpha (α) and subsequent McDonald’s omega (ω) coefficients:

• Total S-DERS Score: α = .92 (indicating excellent overall scale reliability)
• Nonacceptance Subscale (7 items): α = .90 (mean = 10.19, SD = 5.30)
• Modulate Subscale (7 items): α = .88 (mean = 10.08, SD = 4.49)
• Awareness Subscale (5 items): α = .83 (mean = 13.14, SD = 4.64)
• Clarity Subscale (2 items): α = .78 to .81 (mean = 2.81, SD = 1.42; inter-item correlation $r > .60$)

Test-Retest Dynamics and Sensitivity to Change

Because the S-DERS is explicitly designed as a state measure, high longitudinal test-retest stability over extended intervals (e.g., weeks or months) is neither expected nor theoretically desirable. Instead, the scale exhibits high stability across very short, neutral control intervals (e.g., 10–15 minute resting periods without intervention; $r > .80$) and demonstrates rapid, sensitive fluctuations across experimental phases (e.g., baseline vs. post-stressor vs. recovery), establishing its utility as an index of dynamic emotional reactivity.

9. Factor Analysis

The transition from the 36-item, 6-factor trait DERS to the 21-item S-DERS required careful structural refinement using factor analysis:

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

During scale development, candidate items adapted from the original DERS pool were administered to assess momentary emotions. Initial principal axis factoring and maximum likelihood EFA with oblimin rotation demonstrated that several items belonging to the original Goals (difficulties engaging in goal-directed behavior) and Impulse (impulse control difficulties) subscales collapsed cleanly into a broader single factor alongside items reflecting lack of perceived emotional control (traditionally categorized under Strategies). This unified factor was labeled Modulate.

Items measuring self-blame, guilt, shame, and disgust regarding one’s emotions coalesced into the Nonacceptance factor. Positively worded attention items loaded cleanly onto Awareness, while items indexing confusion regarding affective valence loaded onto Clarity.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Subsequent structural modeling validated the hypothesized four-factor oblique model against competing alternative structures:

• Unidimensional Model: Fitting all 21 items onto a single latent “state dysregulation” factor yielded poor fit ($\chi^2/df > 5.2$, $ ext{CFI} = .72$,$ ext{RMSEA} = .114$).
• Six-Factor Model: Emulating the original trait structure resulted in extreme multicollinearity between Goals, Impulse, and Strategies ($r > .85$), producing non-positive definite covariance matrices.
• Four-Factor Oblique Model: The four-factor structure demonstrated superior fit across standard benchmarks: $\chi^2(183) = 421.32$, $p < .001$; $ ext{CFI} = .936$;$ ext{TLI} = .927$;$ ext{RMSEA} = .052$ (90% CI [.045, .058]); $ ext{SRMR} = .051$. Standardized factor loadings across items ranged between .54 and .88, confirming high construct representation.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The S-DERS is a 21-item, pen-and-paper or computer-administered self-report inventory. Its operational characteristics are structured as follows:

• Administration Format: Self-report questionnaire, completed individually via paper, computer, or mobile smartphone interface (EMA).
• Completion Time: Approximately 2 to 4 minutes.
• Target Population: Adolescents and adults (validated primarily in individuals aged 18 and older).
• Temporal Instruction: Respondents are explicitly instructed: “Please read each statement and indicate how much it applies to YOUR EMOTIONS RIGHT NOW.”
• Response Scale: 5-point Likert scale:
  • 1 = Not at all
  • 2 = Somewhat
  • 3 = Moderately
  • 4 = Very Much
  • 5 = Completely
• Subscale Composition:
  • Nonacceptance (7 items): Items 1, 4, 5, 8, 12, 18, 20
  • Modulate (7 items): Items 3, 9, 10, 13, 15, 17, 21
  • Awareness (5 items – Reverse Scored): Items 2, 6, 11, 16, 19
  • Clarity (2 items): Items 7, 14
• Scoring Protocol:
  • Step 1 (Reverse Scoring): Reverse the scores for the 5 Awareness items: $1
    ightarrow 5$, $2
    ightarrow 4$, $3
    ightarrow 3$, $4
    ightarrow 2$, $5
    ightarrow 1$.
  • Step 2 (Subscale Summation): Sum the item responses for each subscale to compute domain scores.
  • Step 3 (Total Score): Sum all 21 items (incorporating reverse-scored values). Total scores range from 21 to 105, with higher scores reflecting greater acute emotion dysregulation.
• Normative Reference Benchmarks: In community validation samples (Lavender et al., 2017), the mean total score was 36.22 ($SD = 10.75$). Raw scores around 50 correspond approximately to the 90th percentile, indicating substantial acute emotional distress and regulatory impairment. Raw scores below 30 reflect low dysregulation and adaptive momentary coping.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The State Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (S-DERS) was formally published in 2017 in the journal Assessment (SAGE Publications). The scale was developed with academic grant support and is broadly accessible for non-commercial, educational, and scientific research purposes without royalty fees. Researchers and clinicians wishing to employ the instrument in empirical studies or clinical practice are expected to cite the original validation publication (Lavender et al., 2017). Commercial reproduction, electronic redistribution in proprietary assessment batteries, or integration into fee-based software platforms requires formal copyright permission from SAGE Publications and the lead author.

12. References

Below are primary foundational references and psychometric validations in APA 7th edition format:

• Gratz, K. L., & Roemer, L. (2004). Multidimensional assessment of emotion regulation and dysregulation: Development, factor structure, and initial validation of the difficulties in emotion regulation scale. Journal of Psychopathology and Behavioral Assessment, 26(1), 41–54. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:JOBA.0000007455.08539.94
• 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. (Ed.). (2015). Handbook of emotion regulation (2nd ed.). Guilford Publications.
• Lavender, J. M., Tull, M. T., DiLillo, D., Messman-Moore, T., & Gratz, K. L. (2017). Development and validation of a state-based measure of emotion dysregulation: The State Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (S-DERS). Assessment, 24(2), 197–209. https://doi.org/10.1177/1073191115601518
• Linehan, M. M. (1993). Cognitive-behavioral treatment of borderline personality disorder. Guilford Press.
• Watson, D., Clark, L. A., & Tellegen, A. (1988). Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scales. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(6), 1063–1070. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.54.6.1063

13. Items of the Scale