Psychometric properties of the children's emotion management scales within a psychiatric sample

The Children's Emotion Management Scales (CEMS) are widely used measures of children's emotion regulation strategies in response to three specific emotions: sadness, anger, and worry. Original factor analyses suggested a three-factor subscale structure for each emotion: inhibition, dysregulation, and coping (Zeman et al., 2001, 2002, 2010). However, this factor structure had not been reexamined since it was originally developed, including within a racially diverse psychiatric sample. The present study attempted to address this gap for the Anger Management Scale and Sadness Management Scale separately, as well as testing the overarching structure of these two in combination. Participants included 302 children (ages 8-12; 70.4% boys; 55.72% African American; 39.3% White) from inpatient and outpatient centers and their primary caregivers. The three-factor structure replicated well with the Anger Management Scale and Sadness Management Scale separately in our sample. A bifactor model that included both higher order emotion factors (i.e., Anger and Sadness) and higher order strategy factors (i.e., Coping, Dysregulation, and Inhibition) best represented the overarching structure of the CEMS. Results from latent correlations and structural regressions showed that some of these factors were related to child-reported depressive symptoms and parent-reported disruptive behaviors, supporting the validity of the bifactor model conceptualization of scores on the CEMS. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2022 APA, all rights reserved).