Emotional Regulation Self-Assessment

Explores how you experience and manage emotions, including awareness, acceptance, and how emotions may affect your reactions or behaviour.

Emotions
6 minFree & PrivateClinically informed
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What this assessment explores

If your emotions often feel overwhelming, hard to make sense of, or like they take over in ways you can't control – this assessment helps you understand what's actually going on beneath that. It explores how you relate to your emotions: whether you can identify them clearly, accept them without judgment, and keep functioning when things feel hard. It's built on the DERS-16, a widely used clinical measure of emotion regulation difficulties.

See the original scale

What you can expect

There are 16 questions, and they'll ask you to reflect on how you tend to experience and respond to difficult emotions.

The questions touch on things like:

  • Whether you can clearly identify what you're feeling when you're upset
  • How you respond to your own distress – with acceptance, or with judgment
  • Whether difficult emotions make it hard to concentrate or follow through on things
  • Whether you feel in control of your behaviour when emotions run high
  • How much you believe you can actually do something to regulate how you feel

Your responses give you a clearer picture of where emotion regulation is most challenging for you – and where there might be room to build something different.

Why this is free and private

Insightable Mind is built by clinical and research psychologists to help people better understand themselves, while contributing to meaningful psychological research. These assessments are offered free as part of that work. Your responses are private – when data is used for research, it's fully anonymised and combined with others to help improve the assessments and answer important questions about human psychology.

Top tips

Our best advice to help you get the most out of your self-assessment:

Usually your first instinct is the right one
Try not to over think each question.
Try not to get stuck on specific words
If a statement is 'mostly true' for you, don't get stuck on the word 'always'.
Be consistent in how you rate
If 'often' means weekly to you, apply that meaning throughout.

Frequently asked questions

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