Preliminary Validation of a Novel Digital Measure of Emotion Regulation (The Three Circles) in Adolescents

Compassion focused therapy presupposes a tripartite model of emotion regulation, with threat, drive, and soothing systems influencing physiology, affect, and behaviour. Prior work has established initial validity and reliability of a digital interactive measure of this model called The Three Circles with young adults. This study aimed to examine its psychometric properties with adolescents.We recruited 204 adolescents to complete established measures assessing emotion, psychological distress, difficulties with emotion regulation, and self-compassion. Participants then completed The Three Circles. We found evidence of good construct validity, with scores on the Three Circles correlating as predicted with established self-report scales, as well as criterion validity, with high threat dominance and low soothing dominance predicting psychological distress and difficulties in emotion regulation, and the opposite predicting higher self-compassion. Results indicate that The Three Circles is suitable for use with adolescents, providing a parsimonious alternative to assess emotion that may mitigate caveats associated with established measures, such as verbal and emotional literacy, alexithymia, and attentional difficulties. As such, there are positive implications for its use in social context settings with adolescents, whereby these advantages may be particularly useful.