Emotional regulation
I took this self assessment this morning:
here’s the link: http://cairncenter.com/forms/difficultiesinemotionalregulation_scale.pdf
then I read a bunch of research about how internally consistent this self report tends to be.
the takeaway is that the questions about awareness of emotional state are useless because they don’t tend to correlate consistently with other measures, but the questions that measure 5 other elements of emotional regulation tend to yield a useful perspective on emotional regulation challenges.
Those measures are:
Nonacceptance of emotional responses
Difficulty engaging in goal-directed behaviour
Impulse control difficulties
Limited access to emotion regulation strategies
Lack of emotional clarity
Looking at people who seek treatment for emotional issues like depression, anxiety, or OCD, the average scores tend to be:
Nonacceptance of emotional responses
average: 14, with 2/3 of people having a score within 6 points of 14
my score: 24
my score is far higher than, meaning worse than, most seekers of mental health help
Difficulty engaging in goal-directed behaviour
average: 15, with 2/3 of people having a score within 4 points of 15
my score: 17
my score is within the range of most people’s, though a little higher than (meaning worse than) average
Impulse control difficulties
average: 12, with 2/3 of people being within 5 points of 12
my score: 15
my score is within the range of most people’s, though higher than (meaning worse than) average
Limited access to emotion regulation strategies
average: 19, with 2/3 of people having a score within 7 points of 19, a very large range
my score: 20
my score is very close to average here especially given the large standard deviation / the width of the 2/3 group
Lack of emotional clarity
average: 12, with 2/3 of people within 4 points of 12
My score: 10
my score is a bit lower than (meaning better than) average, though within the range of most people’s.
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I was reading about this because I discovered that what I have kind of offhandedly thought about as an issue I have with having my own sense of my own emotions, separate from other people, might more accurately be characterized as a challenge with regulating emotional affect, which is something that is related to autistic spectrum disorders. I was reading an interesting blog by a clinical psychologist about the “low arousal approach” to managing autism, which sees this emotional regulation issue as a central piece of the autism puzzle, and thus prescribes a course of action that includes structuring environments to reduce the chance of emotional regulation difficulties in care settings.
i was thinking maybe I should think about this for myself.