Ability emotional intelligence and the temporal dynamics of emotion: Evidence for dampened reactivity at reflective...

Emotional intelligence (EI) may involve acute sensitivity to affective cues, particularly at early stages of emotional processing. Because emotional experiences unfold dynamically over time, we examined how emotional responses evolve once they become consciously accessible to determine whether the acute emotional sensitivity previously associated with EI extends to consciously experienced emotional dynamics. In this study, we examined how three facets of EI, namely, emotion recognition, understanding, and management, shape the temporal dynamics of subjective affective responses. We recruited 151 participants who completed a modified Dynamic Affective Rating Task while continuously rating their feelings while viewing pleasant and unpleasant images. We extracted three indices: onset time (how quickly an affective change began), peak amplitude (the maximal shift in perceived pleasantness or unpleasantness), and velocity (the rate at which the emotional response built). Unpleasant images elicited larger and faster responses than pleasant ones, consistent with a classic negativity bias. Contrary to predictions derived from the hypersensitivity hypothesis, higher emotion recognition and understanding scores predicted lower peak amplitudes and slower emotional responses. Emotion management score predicted shorter onset times across valences but did not predict peak amplitude or velocity. We interpreted these findings as indicating that emotion recognition and understanding may down-modulate consciously experienced emotional reactivity. More broadly, our findings call for a refinement of the hypersensitivity hypothesis, indicating that the emotional sensitivity associated with EI may be primarily expressed during early, spontaneous stages of emotional processing rather than extending uniformly to later, consciously experienced stages. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).