Cognitive emotion regulation strategies and emotional problems in 9–11-year-old children

Abstract

The present study describes the development of the child version of the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ-k). Like the adult version of the CERQ, the CERQ-k measures nine cognitive emotion regulation strategies that children may use after having experienced negative life events. The original CERQ was considered suitable for adults and adolescents aged 12 and older. The CERQ-k was constructed for children of 9, 10 and 11 years of age. The present study describes some psychometric properties of the CERQ-k and relationships with measures of depression, fearfulness and worry among 717 primary school youngsters. Principal component analyses confirmed the allocation of most items to subscales, while Cronbach's alphas of most subscales exceeded 0.70. Cognitive emotion regulation strategies were found to be related to the reporting of symptoms of depression, fearfulness and worry, which provided some evidence for criterion-related validity.

Cognitive coping and childhood anxiety disorders

“…Before intake, 179 children were sent the Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire-kids version (CERQ-k) [12] to their home addresses. As a part of the routine intake procedure, all children and their parents were interviewed with the Anxiety Disorders Interview Schedule for Children (ADIS-C) [26].…”

“…Children become progressively more able to regulate their emotions in response to stress in a cognitive way [20,24]. Recently, a questionnaire (i.e., Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire-kids version; CERQ-k) was developed to assess cognitive coping strategies in 9-11-year-old children [12].…”

“…Garnefski et al [12] examined the association between nine cognitive coping strategies, assessed by the CERQ-k, and fearfulness in a community sample of 717 children. A substantial percentage (i.e., 28%) of the variance in fearfulness in children could be explained by the use of cognitive coping strategies.…”

“…Based on the original study on the CERQ-k by Garnefski et al [12], we hypothesized that anxiety-disordered children would use significantly more 'maladaptive' cognitive coping strategies (i.e., self-blame, catastrophizing and rumination) and less 'adaptive' cognitive coping strategies (i.e., positive reappraisal; positive refocusing) in response to negative life events than non-anxious children. With respect to cognitive coping in specific anxiety disorder subtypes, we hypothesized that children with a generalized anxiety disorder would make more use of the strategy rumination as compared to other anxiety disorder subtypes.…”

Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR) in children and adolescents with subthreshold PTSD after medically related trauma: design of a randomized controlled trial

“…It has a child version for 9–11-year-olds (CERQ-K; Garnefski, Rieffe, Jellesma, Terwogt, & Kraaij, 2007) and a version for 12–18 year old adolescents (Garnefski, Kraaij, & Spinhoven, 2002); both have 36 items. The only difference between both version is the age-appropriate formulation of the questions.…”