Emotional Regulation: What It Is and Why It Matters

We all know what it’s like to act on emotions in the moment – maybe you yelled at someone out of frustration, or you acted out of character in a moment of high anxiety. Everyone acts out sometimes, but some people seem to be better at keeping their emotional urges under control. This is because they’ve developed better emotional regulation.

Emotional regulation is a skill (not a trait!) that can be learned, but it’s not your fault if it’s something you struggle with; it’s much easier to develop good emotional regulation when you grow up with a secure base and a safe environment, so not everybody has the opportunity to learn to regulate their emotions in childhood. However, as adults, it becomes our responsibility to regulate our emotional responses to avoid causing harm or distress to others – and ourselves.

In this article, we’re going to explore the scientific background of emotional regulation and deep dive into one particular model of emotion regulation, the DERS¹ – the short version of which (DERS-16) we use in our own emotion regulation quiz. We’ll help you to understand your quiz scores and look into how your attachment style relates to emotion regulation difficulties. By the end, you’ll have a greater understanding of the components and psychological background of emotional regulation.

What Is Emotional Regulation? A Research-Based Definition

Emotional regulation (or emotion regulation) is a learned skill, sometimes learned in childhood through positive role models and social learning, and sometimes learned in adulthood through purposeful action and practice. Whichever way you learn emotional regulation, improving this skill helps you to cope with negative emotions and difficult experiences.

It’s important to note that emotional regulation doesn’t mean not experiencing high or intense emotions, but being able to manage them and control our behavioral impulses when we do. Even when our emotions are valid, our reactions can sometimes hurt ourselves and people around us.

Emotions themselves aren’t a bad thing, even when they’re negative – for example, fear can keep us away from danger, anger can drive us to protect ourselves, and jealousy can motivate us to get what we want. But when our emotions are mismatched to the intensity or type of situation we’re in, they can cause problems. As researchers put it:

“Emotions are harmful when they are the wrong intensity, duration, frequency, or type for a particular situation, and maladaptively bias cognition and behavior”²

This is why psychologists want to understand emotion regulation, how we emotionally regulate, and how we can improve our own emotion regulation skills. This is especially useful to us if we didn’t have the opportunity to learn emotional regulation while growing up.

The Six Dimensions of Emotion Regulation (DERS)

There are different ways we can conceptualize emotional regulation, and a few are validated in psychological research. One of the most well established models is the six dimensions of emotional regulation established by Gratz & Roemer, who came up with the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS)¹.

Gratz & Roemer wanted to combine existing ideas about emotional regulation that thought of it as mainly behavioral or emotional control and awareness. Their research came up with 6 dimensions of difficulties in emotion regulation:

Since the DERS measures difficulties, high scores reflect greater difficulty, while low scores reflect better emotional regulation skills. The Attachment Project global study with 1,668,988 participants categorized scores on each subdomain as low, medium, or high emotion regulation difficulty based on the spread of data.

1. Nonacceptance of Emotional Responses

Nonacceptance of emotional responses describes difficulty coming to terms with your own distress, often resulting in “secondary emotions” like anger or shame. For example, you feel sad about a breakup, but you can’t tolerate that feeling of sadness, so you begin to feel ashamed because you feel sad.

In The Attachment Project emotion regulation study, 29% of participants scored high on nonacceptance of emotional responses, 44% scored medium, and 27% scored low.

Research has shown that secondary negative emotions due to nonacceptance increase the severity of the original, primary negative emotion, which, in turn, worsens the secondary negative emotion³. This is how we can end up in repeated cycles of negativity that are difficult to break; in the breakup example, your feelings of shame might make you feel even more sad about the breakup, resulting in a continuous spiral.

2. Difficulty Engaging in Goal-Directed Behavior

Goal-directed behavior refers to the tasks and chores we have to complete to achieve our goals. This doesn’t have to be a big goal – it could be as simple as doing laundry so that you have clean clothes tomorrow. Sometimes, our emotions can be so big that they stop us from doing or focusing on what we need to do.

In The Attachment Project emotion regulation study, 34% scored high on difficulty engaging in goal-directed behavior, 41% scored medium, and only 25% scored low – making this the most highly scoring subdomain in the study.

Higher attachment avoidance has been associated with less difficulty engaging in goal-directed behavior⁴. This makes sense, since avoidance involves suppressing those emotions and thoughts that might be distracting – although studies have found that triggering attachment insecurity in people with avoidant attachment styles removes their advantage on cognitive tasks⁵.

3. Impulse Control Difficulties

Impulse control might be one of the most recognizable domains of emotional regulation. When our emotions are high, they can override our brain’s usual decision making and behavioral inhibition processes, causing us to act in ways we usually wouldn’t – in other words, acting on emotion, or acting on impulse.

A common example of this would be saying something we regret when we feel hurt or angry. This is normal – rare occurrences like this don’t mean you have impulse control difficulties, but if you often find yourself regretting actions taken on emotion, it might be worth looking deeper into this particular domain.

In The Attachment Project emotion regulation research, 26% scored highly in impulse control difficulties, 42% scored medium, and 32% scored low. This makes impulse control difficulties the lowest scoring subdomain in our study, suggesting impulse control is the emotion regulation factor we find the easiest to manage.

Impulse control difficulties have been associated with attachment anxiety⁴. It’s possible that this is because the same brain mechanisms responsible for impulse control also play a role in regulating emotional intensity, so impairment of these brain mechanisms can result in both attachment anxiety and difficulty with impulse control.

Impulse control difficulties in the context of emotional regulation are different to impulsivity as a trait. Some people are more impulsive across the board, but impulse control difficulties related to emotional regulation specifically result from intense emotions.

4. Lack of Emotional Awareness

Emotional awareness is the ability to attend to and acknowledge your emotions. This is different to emotional clarity, which signifies a deeper understanding of what you’re experiencing.

If you lack emotional awareness, you might not be able to name your emotions, even if you feel them in your body. You might feel that your emotions are not important, purposely ignoring them or choosing not to spend time understanding them.

If you’ve taken our emotion regulation quiz, you might notice lack of emotional awareness is missing from our results. This is because our quiz is based on the DERS-16, a shortened, more accessible version of the DERS⁶. During the development of the DERS-16, it was found that lack of emotional awareness didn’t contribute much to the results, and omitting it entirely didn’t change whether DERS-16 scores matched up to the original DERS.

5. Limited Access to Emotion Regulation Strategies

Emotion regulation strategies are the ways we manage our difficult emotions. This means coping with them, rather than avoiding or suppressing them.

If you have limited access to emotion regulation strategies, you might believe that nothing can be done to regulate your emotions once you’re upset. It might take you a long time to feel better, and you might “bedrot” or struggle to find a way out of the emotion.

In The Attachment Project emotion regulation study, 30% scored high in limited access to emotion regulation strategies, 42% scored medium, and 29% scored low (percentages have been rounded to the nearest whole number, so may not add up to 100%).

Limited access to emotion regulation strategies has been associated with attachment anxiety⁴. Again, this could be because brain areas associated with down-regulating (decreasing) intense emotions are impaired. Since people with high attachment anxiety tend to experience strong emotions, it might feel more difficult to come out of them.

6. Lack of Emotional Clarity

Emotional clarity describes understanding how you’re feeling – not just paying attention to your emotions, but being able to untangle and make sense of them. If you lack emotional clarity, you might be able to recognize that you’re feeling an intense emotion but feel confused or unsure about how you feel.

In our global The Attachment Project emotion regulation study, 31% of participants scored high on lack of emotional clarity, 44% scored medium, and 25% scored low.

Lack of emotional clarity has been particularly associated with attachment avoidance⁴. This makes sense – if you’re avoiding an emotion, you’re likely not spending enough time with it to understand what it really is. You might have the emotional awareness to know that you’re experiencing a bad feeling, but not be able to label it clearly or accurately.

How Attachment Shapes Emotional Regulation

Attachment theory is already entwined with emotion regulation: as babies, we don’t have the ability to regulate our own emotions – we rely on our caregivers to do that for us by offering comfort. If we don’t receive this, we develop one of two ways to manage this: either upregulating our attention seeking efforts until the care we need arrives, or downregulating our efforts so that we no longer need it.

Attachment anxiety is associated with hyperactivating emotion regulation strategies like demanding proximity, worry, and hypervigilance, while attachment avoidance is associated with deactivating strategies like creating emotional distance and suppressing stressful thoughts and memories⁵.

Both hyperactivating and deactivating strategies are attempts to relieve distress when a caregiver isn’t giving the necessary comfort. We’ve touched on how these might show up in the DERS-16: attachment avoidance is associated with less difficulty engaging in goal-directed behavior and greater difficulty with emotional clarity, while attachment anxiety is associated with greater difficulties with impulse control and access to regulation strategies⁴.

This study used the same attachment measure our free attachment quiz is based on (the Experiences in Close Relationships-Revised scale⁹), so it measured the two scales of attachment anxiety and attachment avoidance, not the 4 attachment style categories. This means that if you have the fearful-avoidant attachment style, high on both attachment insecurity scales, you might experience aspects of both high attachment avoidance and high attachment anxiety.

Emotional Regulation Examples by Attachment Style

A simplified explanation of how emotional regulation shows up for each attachment style might look like this:

Secure

• Recognizes and processes emotions
• Feels emotions without feeling consumed by them
• Has healthy emotional regulation strategies, like mindfulness and grounding techniques, at their disposal

Anxious

• Can feel heightened negative emotions like fear, anger, and jealousy
• Might be extra sensitive to emotional triggers
• Might try to regulate emotions externally, e.g. seeking validation from others, instead of using their own regulation strategies

Dismissive-Avoidant

• Suppresses or avoids negative emotions
• Might use non-emotional tasks like work projects as distractions
• Might use avoidance due to the absence of healthy emotional regulation strategies

Fearful-Avoidant

• Might cycle between heightened negative emotions and emotional suppression
• May seek emotional regulation both through avoidance and external validation
• Might avoid emotional triggers the most due to negative perceptions of self and others

To help illustrate these examples, consider the following scenarios:

High Attachment Anxiety and Emotional Regulation Example

Neil has the anxious-preoccupied attachment style. He considers himself quite sensitive, and tends to look for reassurance from others to regulate his emotions rather than using healthy strategies.

Neil’s girlfriend works away from Monday-Friday, but they call every Wednesday at 6pm. Neil feels a high baseline level of anxiety throughout the week, which is only relieved when his girlfriend calls. He spends all of Wednesday worrying that she might forget, and notices nervousness and sweating that increases every minute past 6pm until the phone rings.

During these calls, Neil seeks reassurance from his girlfriend by asking her to confirm that she loves him and checking in on who she’s been hanging out with, although he tries to do this playfully. One day, Neil’s girlfriend doesn’t call at 6pm. He tries to call 5 times in the following 30 minutes, becoming extremely distressed and worrying that she might be on a date with someone else. By the time his girlfriend calls to explain that she was held up at work, Neil is feeling anxious and angry and starts to accuse her of lying.

When Neil’s girlfriend responds to this by reassuring him, he feels regulated again – reinforcing his need for emotional regulation through external validation.

High Attachment Avoidance and Emotional Regulation Example

Emma has a dismissive-avoidant attachment style. She does not consider herself sensitive, and she feels she’s rarely affected by things that would usually upset others. When she argues with her girlfriend, she shrugs it off and waits for her girlfriend to initiate reconciliation while distracting herself with work or hanging out with friends.

One day, Emma and her girlfriend have a particularly difficult argument in which both have said very hurtful things. Emma knows she feels low, but she doesn’t pay attention to exactly how she feels and couldn’t name the emotions she’s experiencing. Instead, she goes out with her friends and forgets about what happened. She doesn’t feel ready to face the intense emotions stemming from the argument, so she ignores her girlfriend’s calls.

When they reconcile, Emma doesn’t feel the need to explain her feelings. Although she thinks it’s healthy to just move on, she doesn’t give herself the opportunity to feel seen and her girlfriend doesn’t learn more about her feelings and experiences. This makes her more susceptible to repeating this conflict.

Where Do You Stand? Understanding DERS-16 Scores

Total scores on the DERS-16 range from 16 to 80, since each of the 16 questions are scored from 1 to 5. Higher scores indicate greater difficulties with emotional regulation. There’s no set cut-off to determine whether you have emotional regulation difficulties, although some have been suggested as guidelines.

By calculating weighted mean scores and pooled standard deviations in community* ⁶, ⁷ and clinical ⁶, ⁸ samples, we can compare percentile groups:

*One community sample removed 2 items from the DERS-16. Percentile ranges were adjusted accordingly and are based on estimations of the full DERS-16.

In this system, the community sample represents the general population, while the clinical sample represents people seeking mental health treatment; you’ll notice that clinical scores tend to be higher than community scores. The scale you choose to compare your score with might depend on which sample you would put yourself in.

Our emotion regulation test based on the DERS-16 gives 3 possible categories: low, medium, and high. These are based on the average and spread of our own data. You can see our cut-off scores for each subscale and the total DERS score below – some of the subscales have more questions than others, which is why minimum and maximum scores differ:

You might notice that your scores are categorized higher on our scale compared with the community sample, but lower compared with the clinical sample. Since we haven’t split our data between community and clinical populations (and we have no way to do so), it makes sense that ours might fall somewhere in the middle.

We might also get more responses from people who are already concerned about their emotional regulation, therefore our participants might on average score higher than a community sample who have been recruited for a study.

Your Scores in Context

Ultimately, don’t get too hung up on categorizing your score – instead, your score should be used as a tool to help you understand the bigger picture. Were you surprised by your score? Were any of your subscale scores particularly higher or lower than others? How might emotion regulation difficulties be playing into other challenges in your life?

The reason we don’t have strict cut-off scores is because it’s important to consider the wider context. It isn’t always helpful to label someone with high emotional regulation difficulties, especially if there’s an emotional or environmental reason why they might be finding it difficult to regulate: everyone has a limit, or a window of tolerance, and when our emotions exceed our coping capabilities we find it very difficult to regulate. Emotional regulation helps us to widen the window of tolerance, but it’s normal to lose the ability to regulate in exceptional circumstances.

For example, you might experience an extremely distressing event like an accident or a natural disaster. In these scenarios, it’s common for our emotions to be greater than our ability to cope. The same can be true if you’re dealing with a mental health disorder like depression, psychosis, or PTSD – these experiences can be associated with a narrower window of tolerance.

With that said, the DERS-16 does seem to be applicable to broad populations – we just need to remember the context when we interpret our scores.

The DERS-16 Across Different Populations

The DERS-16 has been validated across several populations – although the “cut-offs” might change, it seems to be successfully measuring emotional regulation in lots of different contexts.

In adolescents, the DERS-16 has been able to successfully differentiate community and psychiatric samples from one another. Adolescents with the highest DERS-16 scores were at higher risk for self-injury, substance use, and exposure to abuse⁹.

The DERS-16 has also been validated for use for people with psychosis and for older adults (age 70-95)¹⁰, ¹¹. Validating scales like these across different populations helps us to be confident that it works as intended for a larger number of people, rather than just for the people who usually take part in scientific studies (typically young people in higher education).

3 Reasons We Chose the DERS-16

We choose our tests carefully, based on what our community needs and what’s available in the psychological research space. Now that you know all about the DERS-16, you know why we chose it for our own emotion regulation test. To summarize, here are the 3 core reasons:

1. It’s Accessible and Quick Without Losing the Power of the Full DERS

Our tests are for everyone, so it’s important that they’re accessible and easy to complete while still providing useful insights. The findings that the DERS-16 is just as effective as the DERS mean that we’re able to deliver a complete psychometric self-assessment in a fraction of the time.

What’s more, your results are delivered to your email address in a document you can come back to whenever you want to – learn about your emotional regulation results in your own time, at your own pace.

2. It Gives You a Detailed View of 5 Different Dimensions of Emotion Regulation

An overall emotional regulation score is great, but a dimensional view is even better. Being able to see how you score on each dimension shows you exactly where your strengths are and what you might need to work on most.

For example, you might find it easy to identify and sit with your emotions, but struggle to find helpful coping mechanisms and focus on anything but your feelings when you’re in them. With the information gained from our DERS-16 results, you’d be able to see this pattern and work on actively managing your emotions instead of getting stuck in them.

3. It’s Scientifically Sound Across Different Populations

Again, our tests are for everyone – a common challenge in psychological research is being able to apply findings to different groups. Research participants often aren’t representative of the general populations; for example, if the DERS-16 had not been tested in clinical populations, we couldn’t be sure that it would be understood and answered the same way by people with and without mental health challenges.

This also applies to people from different cultural, social, or economic backgrounds. It would be difficult to test an assessment on every possible population, but the more samples we find positive results with, the more confident we can feel about the test overall. The fact that the DERS-16 has been found to be useful for several populations gives us more certainty about its usefulness for our community.

Do you know your DERS-16 score yet? Take our emotional regulation test to find out.

How to Improve Emotion Regulation: Evidence-Based Strategies

Getting your DERS-16 score is the first step to improving your emotion regulation skills – this will show you which dimensions are your strengths and which you need to work on. With this information, you can choose the most helpful strategies.

Mindfulness: Mindfulness is a skill we can practice to help us stay in the present. Mindfulness-based interventions have been shown to improve emotion regulation by helping us to attend to our emotions in the moment, meaning we can recognize them and reappraise them, then respond the way we choose to – instead of the way our emotions drive us to¹². You can practice mindfulness on your own or with guidance from a mental health professional, but remember that, like any skill, it takes time and practice to improve. It’s okay if it doesn’t come naturally to you right away.

Psychological therapies: There are lots of psychological therapies that can help with emotional regulation, including Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy (CBT), Dialectical Behavioral Therapy (DBT; commonly used in BPD), Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT), psychodynamic therapy, and group therapy¹³. Emotional regulation therapy might draw on aspects of multiple types of therapy. Take your time to find a therapist and type of therapy that works for you – note that skills-based therapies usually take the form of guiding you through your current difficulties, rather than exploring your history.

Attachment security: Attachment security and emotional regulation go hand-in-hand – if you build a secure attachment style, you will likely see improvements in your emotion regulation too. Time and positive relationships with others can lead to an earned secure attachment style, but working specifically on your attachment anxiety and/or attachment avoidance could support this process.

Conclusion

Emotional regulation is a practicable skill that anyone can improve upon, although it may be more challenging for some than it is for others. There are several different dimensions of emotional regulation, including the ability to recognize and name emotions, as well as being able to implement regulation strategies.

Emotional regulation is inherently implicated in attachment theory: attachment anxiety is associated with hyperactivation of emotions when comfort isn’t available, while attachment avoidance is associated with deactivation of emotions. Both forms of attachment insecurity result in lower emotion regulation skills, even though this appears in different forms. If you have the fearful-avoidant attachment style, you might experience both.

The Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS) and its short-form DERS-16 both effectively measure emotion regulation difficulties, and the DERS-16 has shown positive results across different clinical and non-clinical populations. However, it’s important to consider the context of your scores: certain life experiences can affect our ability to emotionally regulate, so you might want to use your scores as a tool to understand the bigger picture rather than to label or categorize your experiences.

Our emotional regulation test uses the DERS-16 and delivers a detailed breakdown of your results from each of the 5 DERS-16 subscales. This test, and your results, are free and easy to understand: take the emotional regulation test (DERS-16).

FAQs

Is emotional regulation the same as emotional intelligence?

Emotional regulation could be considered a component of emotional intelligence, but it describes a more specific skill. Emotional regulation is focused on recognizing your emotions and how you respond, while emotional intelligence involves an interpersonal element of understanding how others feel and how everyone’s emotions play into relationships.

What are signs of poor emotional regulation?

Inability to recognize, name, or cope with emotions might signal difficulties with emotional regulation.

What kind of trauma causes emotional dysregulation?

Emotional dysregulation can happen when our emotions exceed our capacity to cope. Any kind of trauma can decrease our coping capacity and therefore lead to emotional regulation difficulties.

Does emotional regulation get worse with age?

On the contrary, emotional regulation tends to improve with age. Researchers think this is because we gain more experience and learn more tools to cope with practice.¹⁴

What does struggling to regulate emotions look like?

When you struggle to regulate emotions, you might use unhealthy coping strategies like seeking reassurance from others, self-sabotaging, or completely avoiding your emotions or the situation surrounding them.

References

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