Emotion Regulation Fatigue Questionnaire 2023 latest version free download

There are currently three official free formal download channels for the "Emotion Regulation Fatigue Questionnaire 2023 Latest Version" (ERF-2023): the assessment tool area of ​​the Public Psychological Resource Library of the Chinese Mental Health Association, the public sharing platform of the Clinical and Counseling Psychology Research Center of the Department of Psychology of Beijing Normal University, and the public resource area of ​​the National Mental Health Assessment Center of the Institute of Psychology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences. All non-commercial purposes can be downloaded and used for free. For commercial purposes, you only need to indicate the original research and development unit (Beijing Normal University Emotion Regulation Research Center revised in 2023) without paying any authorization fees.

During this period, I worked in universities and companies to provide psychological services, and almost every week I received three or four messages requesting resources for this questionnaire. There were counselors from universities, EAP specialists from companies, and bloggers who popularized psychological science. Everyone’s demands were surprisingly consistent: the old version of the questions was too out of step with today’s life scenes. In the previous 2019 version of the old questionnaire, many questions were still designed around the exhaustion of "actively regulating negative emotions", such as "Do you find it difficult to calm down your anger", which was quite accurate four or five years ago. Nowadays, many people's exhaustion is faked by "passively pretending to be emotional", and the old version cannot measure it at all.

The core change of the 2023 version is the addition of 11 questions related to "passive emotional labor", such as "Do you often need to pretend to be in a good mood when you are tired?" "Do you force yourself to adjust your emotions in order to take care of other people's feelings?" This just hits the real exhaustion points of "emotional internal friction" and "personal baggage" that everyone often talks about now. Last month, I helped an Internet company in Hangzhou do employee mental health screening. At the beginning, the administration got an old version that I didn’t know where to download. After the test, only 11.7% of employees had moderate or above emotional regulation fatigue. Everyone felt that it was inaccurate - after all, during that time, the team was working on the 618 project, and even the turnover rate was 8 points higher than usual. Later, the 2023 version was retested, and the proportion of moderate or above fatigue rose directly to 29.4%. During follow-up interviews, we found out that the exhaustion of many employees does not come from being unable to digest their bad emotions. It comes from having to pretend to be positive to their leaders, pretend to be patient to customers, and report good news to their parents after get off work every day. This kind of "having to pretend" exhaustion is not covered at all by the old version.

Of course, this does not mean that this new version is perfect. I have seen an article on reliability and validity testing published by the School of Psychological and Cognitive Science at Peking University late last year. It said that because the 2023 version has added 3 new dimensions, the test-retest reliability is 0.78, which is slightly lower than the 0.82 of the 2019 version. If you are doing a long-term follow-up study, for example, if you want to track the emotional changes of a certain group for six months, the stability of the old version will be better. But if you are doing current emotional exhaustion screening, especially for groups that require a lot of emotional labor, such as the service industry, the Internet industry, and primary and secondary school teachers, the new version is much more sensitive.

To be honest, I have encountered a lot of people stepping on the download trap. A middle school psychology teacher came to me before and said that the 2023 version she downloaded from a paid document website showed severe fatigue after half of the test for the students. She was so scared that she almost asked the parents one by one. Later, when I saw her version, I confused the adult norm and the adolescent norm. The emotional threshold of adolescents is lower than that of adults, so this test is definitely inaccurate. So when downloading, try to go to the three official channels I mentioned at the beginning. They all come with complete norms, scoring guides and result explanations, so you don’t have to guess the scoring rules by yourself.

When I usually conduct screenings for companies, if there are many people and time is tight, I will first ask everyone to take three pre-screening questions newly added in the 2023 version: "Have you deliberately avoided discussing topics related to emotions in the past week?" "Have you felt... You have to ask "I don't want to have any mood swings" and "Have you felt tired in the past week because you had to adjust your mood?" If you answer "yes" to more than two of these three questions, and then do a full set of 28 questions, the efficiency will be improved a lot, and everyone will not find it too troublesome to fill out the questionnaire.

By the way, I want to mention one more thing. This questionnaire is just a screening tool. Even if the score is high, don’t panic. It can only mean that you have been depleted of emotional regulation resources recently, and it does not mean that you have a mental illness. If you continue to feel that you can't get over it, talk to a professional psychological counselor, or even give yourself two days off and do nothing, which is better than worrying about it on your own. If you really can't find the download channel, you can also leave your contact information in the comment area. I have the original version downloaded from the Beijing Normal University platform. I will send it to you when I have time. Anyway, they are all public and free resources, saving everyone a waste of time looking for them.