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Developing Age and Gender Adjusted Normative Reference Values for the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS)

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Abstract

Emotion Regulation (ER) is an important aspect of every-day behavior relevant to both clinical and diagnostic practice. To date several studies have investigated the psychometric properties of Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS; Gratz and Roemer 2004) scores, however, the extent to which the DERS is affected by the gender and/or age of the respondents has so far been only poorly investigated. Furthermore, no studies have yet offered suggestions or guidelines on how to interpret different DERS scores. To fill this gap, the current study aimed at: (a) investigating with two relatively large Italian samples the influence of gender and age on DERS scores; (b) introducing a new approach to develop age and gender adjusted normative reference values for the DERS; (c) providing suggestions on how to interpret the resultant, age and gender adjusted, T-transformed, DERS scores. The results of our analyses show that within our first Italian sample (n = 808), DERS scores tended to decrease with age, whereas gender had a small impact on them. Moreover, and more importantly, our age and gender adjusted, T-transformed, DERS scores calculated based on this first sample almost perfectly matched the scores produced by a second, independent, nonclinical Italian sample (n = 404). Our findings thus support the effectiveness of our method to generate normative reference values for the DERS.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Psychology, University of Turin, Turin, Italy

    Luciano Giromini, Francesca Ales, Alessandro Zennaro & Claudia Pignolo

  2. Department of Dynamic and Clinical Psychology, Sapienza University of Rome, Rome, Italy

    Gaia de Campora

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  1. Luciano Giromini
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  2. Francesca Ales
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  3. Gaia de Campora
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  4. Alessandro Zennaro
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  5. Claudia Pignolo
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Correspondence to Luciano Giromini.

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Conflict of Interest

Luciano Giromini, Francesca Ales, Gaia de Campora, Alessandro Zennaro, and Claudia Pignolo declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Experiment Participants

The current study used archival data retrieved from three previously published research studies. In all cases, the research projects had been approved by the relevant institutional review boards.

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Appendix A: Equations to Calculate Age and Gender Adjusted T-Scores from Raw DERS Values

Appendix A: Equations to Calculate Age and Gender Adjusted T-Scores from Raw DERS Values

\( Nonacceptance\ Adj. T\ Score=\frac{Raw\ Nonacceptance\ Value-\left(14.528-\left( Age\times .060\right)-\left( Gender\times .100\right)\right)}{4.756}\times 10+50 \)

\( Goals\ Adj. T\ Score=\frac{Raw\ Goals\ Value-\left(16.448-\left( Age\times .096\right)+\left( Gender\times .293\right)\right)}{4.207}\times 10+50 \)

\( Impulse\ Adj. T\ Score=\frac{Raw\ Impulse\ Value-\left(13.506-\left( Age\times .057\right)+\left( Gender\times .351\right)\right)}{4.588}\times 10+50 \)

\( Awareness\ Adj. T\ Score=\frac{Raw\ Awareness\ Value-\left(14.312-\left( Age\times .037\right)-\left( Gender\times .541\right)\right)}{4.049}\times 10+50 \)

\( Strategies\ Adj. T\ Score=\frac{Raw\ Strategies\ Value-\left(19.307-\left( Age\times .095\right)+\left( Gender\times .213\right)\right)}{6.323}\times 10+50 \)

\( Clarity\ Adj. T\ Score=\frac{Raw\ Clarity\ Value-\left(12.386-\left( Age\times .063\right)-\left( Gender\times .113\right)\right)}{3.765}\times 10+50 \)

\( Total\ Adj. T\ Score=\frac{Raw\ Total\ Value-\left(90.486-\left( Age\times .333\right)+\left( Gender\times .102\right)\right)}{19.798}\times 10+50 \)

  1. Notes. Age: No. of years; Gender: M = 0, F = 1.

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Giromini, L., Ales, F., de Campora, G. et al. Developing Age and Gender Adjusted Normative Reference Values for the Difficulties in Emotion Regulation Scale (DERS). J Psychopathol Behav Assess 39, 705–714 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10862-017-9611-0

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