Emotions are part of everyday life. In order to achieve their goals (including maintaining well-being), people use different emotion regulation strategies. Emotion regulation is the process by which people try to modify the expression of an emotion in a specific situation. There is burgeoning interest in emotion regulation research due to its implications for physical and mental health. Patients with a fibromyalgia diagnosis suffer from chronic widespread pain that is usually accompanied by a wide variety of symptoms, among them persistent fatigue, muscle stiffness, non-restorative sleep, cognitive difficulties (fibrofog) in attention, memory or concentration. Mood and anxiety symptoms are highly prevalent in fibromyalgia, and deficits in emotion regulation in patients with this syndrome are well known. With a worldwide prevalence between 2-4% and in the absence of a curative treatment, the abovementioned constellation of symptoms seriously affect patients’ daily life. The impact on personal, economic and social areas is dramatic. The Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ) measures emotion regulation with cognitive base (what we think when an emotion emerges facing a situation in life). The CERQ captures nine emotion regulation strategies: Self-blame, Acceptance, Rumination, Positive refocusing, Refocus on planning, Positive reappraisal, Putting into perspective, Catastrophizing and Blaming others. These strategies can help a person to regulate emotions, in an "Adaptive" or "Less Adaptive" way, facilitating or hindering the handling of the situation. In this sense, the use of "Less adaptive" regulatory strategies is conceived as a transdiagnostic factor of psychopathological vulnerability. In this dissertation, we examined the psychometric properties of the Spanish version of the CERQ, whose format was adapted (items grouped by dimension) considering fibromyalgia symptoms. For this purpose, we collected CERQ and clinical data from 231 patients with fibromyalgia participating in a randomized, controlled trial carried out at Parc Sanitari Sant Joan de Déu (St. Boi de Llobregat, Spain). Data analysis supported the sound psychometric properties of the CERQ in patients with fibromyalgia and confirmed the nine-factor structure, adequate internal consistency, and minimal overlapping among subscales found in previous studies with clinical and non-clinical samples. Additionally, correlational and regression analysis supported the construct validity of the CERQ. To sum up, we concluded that the adapted version of the CERQ is a sound and useful instrument for assessing cognitive emotion regulation in fibromyalgia. For the main outcome of this doctoral dissertation, we have an empirically validated measure to assess the frequency of use of nine cognitive emotion regulation strategies in fibromyalgia patients, who are usually characterized by emotion regulation difficulties. Future studies using a longitudinal design might address some pending psychometric aspects of the CERQ in patients with fibromyalgia, such as stability over time (test-retest reliability) and sensitivity to change.
Propiedades psicométricas del Cognitive Emotion Regulation Questionnaire (CERQ) en pacientes con fibromialgia
Reche Camba, E. (Author). 29 Apr 2019
Student thesis: Doctoral thesis
Student thesis: Doctoral thesis