Emotionality and pleasantness of mixed‐emotion stimuli: The role of language, modality, and emotional intelligence

Abstract

The study aimed to explore how 174 Spanish first language (L1) and foreign language (LX) users perceive emotionality and pleasantness in audiovisual and purely visual material eliciting blended emotions, and whether cultural background and Trait Emotional Intelligence (EI) are linked to emotion perception. Overall, LX users tended to provide higher ratings of emotionality and pleasantness than L1 users, suggesting that they might be aware of the LX detachment effect and overcompensate when providing emotion perception ratings. American participants rated the stimuli as more emotional and pleasant than Asian participants regardless of modality of presentation. On the other hand, Trait EI turned out to be unrelated to emotionality and pleasantness contrary to previous evidence suggesting a positive role of EI in decoding emotions.