Emotional Regulation Self-Assessment
Explores how you experience and manage emotions, including awareness, acceptance, and how emotions may affect your reactions or behaviour.
What is emotion regulation?
Emotion regulation is what we do, automatically and on purpose, to influence which emotions we have, when we have them, and how we express them. Difficulties usually show up in specific areas: noticing what you feel, accepting strong emotions, behaving the way you want to when upset, or having strategies that actually help. This self-assessment helps you see your own pattern.
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, a widely used clinical measure of emotion regulation difficulties.
See the original scaleWhat you can expect
There are 36 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.
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Dr Ben Buchanan
Clinical Psychologist
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:
