Abstract
Among individuals experiencing internalizing psychopathology, high levels of emotion reactivity—the degree to which they experience emotions strongly or intensely, over extended periods of time, and as elicited by a variety of stimuli—increase risk for self-injurious thoughts and behaviors. Researchers developed the Emotion Reactivity Scale (ERS) to assess emotion reactivity, with psychometric support for the measure largely restricted to at-risk clinical populations. We know little of the psychometric properties of the ERS when administered as a screening measure in community assessments. In a study of the psychometric properties of the ERS in a non-clinical assessment of adults, we recruited 105 participants (Mage = 44.6; 82.9% female) as part of a larger study of adolescent social anxiety and family relationships. Participants completed the ERS, self-report measures of various psychosocial domains, and an impromptu speech task, before and during which they self-reported their arousal. Scores taken from the ERS demonstrated strong internal consistency and demonstrated facets of validity: (a) positive relations with measures of internalizing psychopathology and parent-adolescent conflict, and negative relations with a measure of quality of life (convergent validity); (b) relations with self-reported anxiety and safety-seeking behaviors, over-and-above self-reported depressive symptoms (incremental validity); and (c) relation with self-reported state arousal during the impromptu speech task, over-and-above self-reported arousal at baseline (criterion-related validity). These findings support the psychometric properties of the ERS when administered in non-clinic assessments of adults. As such, they have important implications for screening assessments designed to identify adults who display the potential for self-injurious thoughts and behaviors.
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Efforts by the second, third, and fourth authors were supported by a grant from the Institute of Education Sciences (R324A180032).
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First author: assisted in executing the study, assisted with data analyses, and wrote the paper. Second and third authors: assisted in executing the study, assisted with data analyses, and collaborated in editing the paper. Fourth author: designed the study, assisted in executing the study, assisted with data analyses, and collaborated in editing the paper.
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Byrne, S., Makol, B.A., Keeley, L.M. et al. Psychometric Properties of the Emotion Reactivity Scale in Community Screening Assessments. J Psychopathol Behav Assess 41, 730–740 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10862-019-09749-8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10862-019-09749-8