Background: According to the hypersensitivity hypothesis, highly emotionally intelligent individuals perceive emotion information at a lower threshold, pay more attention to emotion information, and may be characterized by more intense emotional experiences. The goal of the present study was to investigate whether and how emotional intelligence (EI) is related to hypersensitivity operationalized as heightened emotional and facial reactions when observing others narrating positive and negative life experiences.

Methods: Participants (144 women) watched positive and negative videos in three different conditions: with no specific instructions (spontaneous condition), with the instructions to put themselves in the character's shoes (empathic condition) and with the instructions to distinguish themselves from the character (distancing condition). The activity of the corrugator supercilii and zygomaticus major muscles was recorded and after each video, the participants reported the arousal corresponding to their emotion during the video. The EI facets emotion recognition (ER), emotion understanding (EU), and emotion management (EM) were measured.

Results: Participants' self-reported arousal and facial motor responses increased in the empathic condition compared to the spontaneous condition and then decreased in the distancing condition. Although there was no effect of EI on reported arousal, EI, specifically EU and EM, seemed to influence facial reactions during the task. In the spontaneous and empathic conditions, EU was associated with a greater difference in zygomaticus activation between positive and negative videos, suggesting that individuals high on this EI facet may react more to positive emotion of others. In the spontaneous and distancing conditions, EM predicted less corrugator activation when watching negative videos, suggesting that individuals high on this EI facet may spontaneously regulate their negative emotions.

Conclusions: This study suggests that hypersensitivity effects might better be captured by implicit measures such as facial reactions rather than explicit ones such as reporting of emotion. They also suggest that some EI facets and viewing conditions (spontaneous, empathic, and distancing view) influence emotional facial reactivity.