Introducing the Emotion Regulation Strategies Questionnaire

This week marks Mental Health Awareness Week, a particularly important event in the Hogrefe calendar and a reminder of the need for understanding, awareness, support and open conversations around mental wellbeing and mental health issues. 

It comes at a time when the true state of the UK population’s mental wellbeing has been the subject of (often controversial) political and public debate. The reality, according to leading UK mental health charity Mind, is that we are facing a ‘mental health emergency’. Sadly, that includes children and young people, with the number who are struggling ‘soaring’. As reported in their 2024 ‘Big Mental Health’ report, 1 in 5 school-age children or young people has a mental health difficulty in England, and there has been an alarming 34% increase in the number of children and young people in Wales referred with anxiety between 2015/16 and 2022/23.

With these statistics in mind, we can think of no better time than Mental Health Awareness Week to share with you our latest assessment for children, adolescents and young adults. From the authors of the Intelligence and Development Scales, 2^nd Edition (IDS-2) comes the Emotion Regulation Strategies Questionnaire (FEEL-KJ-2), now available for use with ages 9 to 20 years. Featuring UK norms from 2024, the FEEL-KJ-2 provides a clear picture of how today’s children and young people are coping with their emotions, by assessing the critical strategies they use when confronted with anger, anxiety and sadness. The measure can be used to help the individual to learn strategies that allow them to cope with their emotions in a healthy, effective way.  

The FEEL-KJ-2 will therefore be useful for a wide range of professions and situations, including social-emotional evaluations, designing treatment plans and monitoring response to treatment or therapy over time. And because the FEEL-KJ-2 has been validated against well-respected measures for diagnosing psychological disorders, the results can also provide an indication of the risk for the development of mental health problems before they occur.  

The FEEL-KJ-2 can be purchased as either a paper and pencil- or a digital-administered assessment, but the scoring is always completed online, giving education and health care professionals an informative report with both ‘big picture’ and in-depth visuals; useful in discussing strategies or treatment plans with the client and other health care professionals.