Investigating measurement invariance of the Emotion Regulation Questionnaire-8 (ERQ-8) across 29 countries

The widely used Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (ERQ) measures the habitual use of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression. Recently, a more economical 8-item version of the ERQ was proposed that showed good model fit. We assessed whether the latent constructs of the ERQ-8 are generalizable across different countries and cultures. To this end, we used data from the COVIDiSTRESS survey and investigated measurement invariance of the ERQ-8 in a large sample that included 11,288 individuals from 29 countries with diverse cultural backgrounds. Our analyses revealed configural and metric invariance of the ERQ-8 in 14 countries. The results suggest that emotion regulation strategies may not readily converge across all cultures. This underscores the importance of testing measurement invariance before interpreting observed differences and similarities between countries. Supplementary information: The online version contains supplementary material available at 10.1007/s12144-022-04220-6.