Emotion Regulation Test:
Discover Your
DERS-16 Score

We all have different coping capacities, and we have all experienced what it’s like for our coping capacity to be overwhelmed by big emotions. Emotional regulation is a learned, practicable skill, that can help us to increase our coping capacity and manage intense emotions.

Knowing where your strengths and challenges lie can help you to maintain a sense of control when emotions feel overwhelming – our emotional dysregulation test shows you which dimensions of emotional regulation might need the most practice.

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The Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale: What It Measures

The Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale, or DERS, is a well-established psychological measure of emotional regulation [1]. It measures your challenges, so higher scores mean greater difficulty, or lower emotional regulation.

The original DERS splits emotion regulation difficulties into 6 dimensions:

• Nonacceptance of emotional responses: difficulty accepting your own distress, you might often feel angry or ashamed of your emotions.
• Difficulty engaging in goal-directed behavior: your emotions are so big that they distract you from doing what you need to do to achieve your goals, like focusing at work or tidying up.
• Impulse control difficulties: acting on your emotional impulses, like yelling when you’re angry even though you wouldn’t normally want to yell.
• Lack of emotional awareness: difficulty acknowledging your emotions or making space for them.
• Limited access to emotion regulation strategies: you believe that, once big emotions take hold, there’s nothing you can do to lower or manage them.
• Lack of emotional clarity: you have difficulty making sense of your emotions, and intense emotions can feel confusing.

The DERS-16

The DERS-16 is a shortened version of the DERS [2]. It’s been found to be just as effective as the DERS as an emotional dysregulation test, but it’s more accessible because it takes less time. The DERS-16 excludes the lack of emotional awareness dimension, because it was found not to impact the overall scores.

Our emotional regulation test uses the DERS-16, meaning you’ll see your scores on the 5 DERS-16 subscales and an overall emotional regulation score. Read more about emotional regulation and why we chose the DERS-16 in our emotion regulation article.

What Does Your DERS-16 Score Mean?

Remember, higher scores mean more difficulties – you’ll receive your scores and whether they fall in the low, medium, or high range for our sample.

There are no strict cut-off scores, because what’s high or low differs between groups of people. For example, people looking for mental health treatment typically score higher than people not looking for mental health treatment, so it’s not helpful to compare their scores to each other [3].

Your DERS-16 scores through this test are compared with a wide population, so don’t get too hung up on your categorization. Instead, use the information about your strengths and challenges to guide your emotion regulation practice.

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Emotion Regulation vs. Emotion Dysregulation

Emotion regulation, or emotional regulation, is a skill that you can learn and improve upon. It involves being able to recognize and respond to your emotions – some people think emotional regulation means not experiencing intense emotions, but this isn’t true. Emotional regulation is actually being able to manage intense emotions, although it’s true that the bigger the feeling, the more difficult it can be to cope with.

Therefore, emotion dysregulation is the inability to understand and manage emotions, resulting in the 6 DERS dimensions.

Why Measuring Your Emotion Regulation Matters

Since emotion regulation is a skill, we need to practice it to keep it up. The DERS-16 shows you where your particular strengths and challenges in emotional regulation are, so it can be helpful to show you where you might want to focus on.

All of us can experience emotional dysregulation, particularly during stressful life periods and big changes, so it’s useful to practice emotion regulation even when we don’t feel like we need it right now.

DERS-16 vs. Emotion Regulation Checklist (ERC) vs. Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ) vs. DERS-16

There are a few other tests out there, but the DERS-16 is the best validated test to understand your strengths and difficulties in emotional regulation.

The Emotion Regulation Checklist (ERC) is one test that people ask about, but this test is designed for children [4]. In the ERC, parents and teachers rate children’s behavior and mood states.

Another is the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ) [5]. The ERQ measures your tendency to use two particular emotion regulation strategies, cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression, but it doesn’t tell you how well you understand these emotions and how successfully you use these or other strategies.

Similarly, the Cogitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ) measures which cognitive strategies you turn to to manage negative life events [6]. The CERQ isn’t freely available for public use.

FAQs

What’s the difference between the DERS and DERS-16?

The DERS-16 is a shorter, more accessible version of the DERS. They’ve been found to be equally effective.

What is the best emotion regulation test?

We chose the DERS-16 because it examines your strengths and challenges across 5 different emotion regulation domains.

Is this test clinically validated?

The DERS-16 is well regarded and has been tested and validated in lots of different populations (see our main article).

What’s the difference between the ERQ and CERQ?

The ERQ measures your tendency to use cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression, while the CERQ measures cognitive coping strategies in response to negative life events.

References

1. Gratz KL, Roemer L. 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. 2004 Mar;26(1):41-54.

2. Bjureberg J, Ljótsson B, Tull MT, Hedman E, Sahlin H, Lundh LG, Bjärehed J, DiLillo D, Messman-Moore T, Gumpert CH, Gratz KL. Development and validation of a brief version of the difficulties in emotion regulation scale: the DERS-16. Journal of psychopathology and behavioral assessment. 2016 Jun;38(2):284-96.

3. Bartholomew E, Smyth C, Buchanan B, Baker S, Hegarty D. A Review of the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale 16 (DERS-16): Factor Structure, Reliability, Measurement Invariance, and Normative Data. 2025. Retrieved https://novopsych.com.au/assessments/formulation/difficulties-in-emotion-regulation-scale-16-item-version-ders-16/

4. Shields A, Cicchetti D. Emotion regulation among school-age children: the development and validation of a new criterion Q-sort scale. Developmental psychology. 1997 Nov;33(6):906.

5. Gross JJ, John OP. Individual differences in two emotion regulation processes: implications for affect, relationships, and well-being. Journal of personality and social psychology. 2003 Aug;85(2):348.

6. Garnefski N, Kraaij V. The cognitive emotion regulation questionnaire. European journal of psychological assessment. 2007 Jan;23(3):141-9.