The German Version of the Emotion Awareness Questionnaire for Children and Adolescents: Associations with Emotion Regulation and Psychosocial Adjustment

Abstract

Emotional awareness is an important variable for children's and adolescents' social and emotional development. The aim of this study was to examine the psychometric properties (e.g., factor structure, internal consistencies) of scores on the German translation of the Emotion Awareness Questionnaire (EAQ; Rieffe, Oosterveld, Miers, Meerum Terwogt, & Ly, 2008 ). Furthermore, to examine the concurrent validity, associations of the six subscales (Differentiating Emotions, Verbal Sharing of Emotions, Not Hiding Emotions, Bodily Unawareness, Attending to Others' Emotions, Analyses of Emotions) with emotion regulation, internalizing and externalizing problems, and prosocial behavior were investigated. Questionnaire data of 1,018 adolescents aged between 11 and 18 were analyzed. The proposed six-factor structure was replicated and internal consistencies were satisfactory. Meaningful associations of the six EAQ subscales with emotion regulation and psychosocial adjustment were found, proving the concurrent validity of this questionnaire. In general, higher emotional awareness was associated with more functional emotion regulation and prosocial behavior, and less dysfunctional emotion regulation and internalizing and externalizing problems. Significant gender differences were detected and are discussed. Overall, the findings suggest that the German EAQ is a useful instrument to assess children's and adolescents' emotional awareness.

Process-Oriented Measurement of Emotion Regulation: General and Specific Associations With Psychosocial Adjustment and Well-Being in (Pre-)Adolescence

“…The mean for each participant was calculated if no more than 30% of answers were missing. Internal consistencies were satisfactory (α internalizing = 0.74; α externalizing = 0.73, α prosocial = 0.69) and in line with previous studies ( 53 , 57 , 58 ).…”

“…When ruminating about their own emotions, adolescents might also be very attentive to the emotions of their social interaction partners. In this regard, previous studies found that higher attention to others’ emotions is associated with more worry and rumination ( 66 ), and also more empathy ( 67 ) and prosocial behavior ( 58 ). Thus, the awareness of others’ emotions might play an important role for the positive association between dysfunctional attentional deployment and prosocial behavior found in this study and should be subject of future research.…”

“…Regulatory goals have also been incorporated within the ER assessment, but emotion awareness has not been included. The way individuals perceive and evaluate their own and others’ emotions (emotional awareness) has been found to be significantly associated with ER ( 58 , 74 ), emotional information processing ( 75 ), empathy ( 67 ), and mental health ( 9 , 70 , 76 ). Furthermore, there are other dimensions of emotions (e.g., duration, intensity) that need attention in future research in this field ( 11 ).…”

Longitudinal effects of emotion awareness and regulation on mental health symptoms in adolescents with and without hearing loss

“…At the same time, development in meta-cognitive skills allows adolescents to develop more complex and self-reliant emotion skills [13,14]. Cross-sectional studies in adolescents have clearly indicated that EA skills, including emotion differentiation, emotion communication, and bodily unawareness, are negatively associated with internalizing symptoms such as depression and anxiety [8][9][10][15][16][17][18][19]. Longitudinal studies have shown that emotion differentiation predicted less depressive symptoms over time [2,8,16,20].…”

Stress reactivity in salivary cortisol and electrocardiogram in adolescents: Investigating sleep disturbances and insomnia

“…On the other hand, it reveals a gender gap in the perception of hormonal stress reactivity. Another explanation for this difference in perception would be that boys have a lower bodily awareness of emotions (Rueth et al, 2019). As low emotional awareness is associated with various mental disorders (Sendzik et al, 2017), this could also be an explanation for the particular stress reactivity in sleep-impaired boys.…”