THE BIZARRENESS EFFECT AND INDIVIDUAL DIFFERENCES IN EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE

The present study was conducted to examine the relationship between emotional intelligence (EI) and the likelihood of the bizarreness effect. Participants in the emotion condition were asked to rate the degree of strange feelings elicited by sentences and participants in the image condition were asked to rate the vividness of images elicited by sentences. The level of EI in participants was assessed with the J-ESCQ (Toyota, Morita & Takšić, 2007). EI was negatively correlated with the recall performance of bizarre sentences for participants in the emotion condition. Results indicate that differences in EI contribute to the likelihood of the bizarreness effect, and that EI suppresses the emotional arousal caused by bizarre sentences.