Emotion Recognition through Language: Development of a Validated Verbal Instrument

Abstract

Emotion recognition is a fundamental communicative skill and plays a key role in the process of emotional acculturation. This article aims to offer emotionally charged but non-explicit verbal expressions of anger, fear, and sadness in order to examine emotion recognition in users of Spanish as an additional language (ELX). To this end, a corpus of 20 emotional scenes was created, from which verbal expressions with comprehensible input for B1-level learners were selected. These expressions were validated through a mixed-method approach using two questionnaires administered to two different samples (n = 92). The final result is a set of 18 emotionally charged verbal expressions associated with the three target emotions. Three levels of difficulty are proposed, allowing the expressions to be used to teach and assess emotion recognition in ELE learners. This study provides an empirically grounded didactic tool that can be integrated into oral comprehension and interaction activities in the classroom, contributing to the development of intercultural communicative competence at intermediate levels.