Emotion awareness and internalising symptoms in children and adolescents: The Emotion Awareness Questionnaire revised

A commonly accepted prerequisite for adaptive emotion regulation is emotion awareness, which refers to an attentional process (e.g. to monitor and differentiate emotions, locate their antecedents) but also includes attitudinal aspects (e.g. how are emotions and their expression valued?). In this study, the Emotion Awareness Questionnaire for children (Rieffe, Meerum Terwogt, Petrides, et al., 2007), developed to measure the key aspects of emotion awareness, was improved conceptually and shortened to a 30-item version. First, the former scale Acting Out (the blunt expression of emotions) previously failed to uniquely contribute to the prediction of internalising symptoms and was therefore replaced by the scale Not Hiding (the tendency not to keep one’s emotion experiences hidden from others), which is theoretically more relevant to internalising symptoms. Second, items that did not load on the intended factor were omitted from the questionnaire. The outcomes from a sample of 665 children and young adolescents showed good psychometric properties and good criterion validity with the related measure for emotional self-efficacy, the TEIQue. Additionally, good concurrent validity was established with respect to common internalising problems during childhood and adolescence: somatic complaints, social anxiety, depression and a tendency for non-productive thinking (worry and rumination).