Table 3.

Comparison between blinded theoretical judgment (by DM and RJ), initial empirical suggestion of problematic items, and the final EPS-15.

			Theoretical judgment	Sum of EPS-25 modification indices indicative of potential cross-loadingsa	EPS-15 final item selection	Factor loadings in validation sample
Subscale	#	Items paraphrased
Suppression	1	Smothered feelings	Yes	0	X	0.78
	6	Could not express feelings	No	145
	11	Kept quiet about feelings	Borderline	13
	16	Bottled up emotions	Yes	0	X	0.85
	21	Tried not to show feelings	Yes	0	X	0.76
Signs of unprocessed Emotions	2	Unwanted feelings kept intruding	Yes	0	X	0.77
	7	Emotional reactions lasted more than a day	Borderline/Yes	0	X	0.71
	12	Repeatedly experienced the same emotion	Borderline/Yes	13
	17	Overwhelmed by emotions	Borderline	73
	22	Thinking about same emotion again and again	Yes	0	X	0.74
Unregulated emotions	3	When upset difficult to control what I said	Yes	0	X	0.68
	8	Reacted too much to what people said or did	Yes	11	X	0.79
	13	Wanted to get own back on someone	Yes	0	X	0.51
	18	Felt urge to smash something	Yes	22
	23	Hard to wind down	Borderline	78
Avoidance	4	Tried to avoid things that might make me upset	Yes	0	X	0.40
	9	Talking about negative feelings made them worse	Borderline	0	X	0.67
	14	Tried to talk only about pleasant things	Borderline/Yes	50
	19	Could not tolerate unpleasant feelings	No	12
	24	Avoided looking at unpleasant things	Borderline/Yes	0	X	0.69
Impoverished emotional experience (“alexithymia”)	5	Emotions felt blunt/dull	Borderline	11	X	0.47
	10	Feelings did not seem to belong to me	No	0
	15	Hard to work out if I felt ill or emotional	Yes	0	X	0.61
	20	Seemed to be a big blank in feelings	Borderline	0
	25	Strong feelings but not sure if emotions	Borderline/Yes	0	X	0.73

EPS-15 Emotional processing Scale. Yes: endorsed as an item typical what the subscale is supposed to measure. No: not endorsed. Borderline: neither typical nor atypical.

^aThis is the sum of all modification indices pertaining to item-factor cross-loadings for each item, as based on the top 30 modification indices for the a priori 5-factor solution for the EPS-25 when fitted on the training data. Note that while there is considerable overlap between blinded theoretical judgments, these modification indices, and the final EPS-15, the reduction of the number of items from 25 to 15 was an iterative process where modification indices were examined for several intermediate scale forms, which for example is why we ultimately decided to include item 5 over items 10 and 20 in the EPS-15.