Students' emotional intelligence and contagion as moderators of the relationship between instructor nonverbal immediacy cues and affective learning

The purpose of this study was twofold: (1) to extend our understanding of nonverbal immediacy by examining how two student traits, emotional intelligence and emotional contagion, moderate the positive association between instructors' nonverbal immediacy cues and students' affective learning and (2) to further explain why nonverbal immediacy cues enhance, and at times, differentially impact student affect. Participants included 305 college students who completed measures assessing their instructor's immediacy cues, their affect for the course and their instructor, and two self-reports which measured their emotional intelligence and contagion.;Collectively, the results extend instructional communication theory by identifying emotional intelligence and emotional contagion as two key constructs that may transfer over well from psychology to instructional communication. While hierarchical regression analyses showed no significant interaction effects for emotional intelligence or contagion, the results suggest that emotional intelligence was a significant predictor of affect for instructor after controlling for instructor nonverbal immediacy cues. If these results suggest that students have different thresholds for affect, researchers could conclude that students with high levels of emotional intelligence may be more likely to experience affect for instructor than students with low levels of emotional intelligence, regardless of how immediate their instructors are. Further examination of the role of other student characteristics as potential moderators of the association between instructors' nonverbal immediacy cues and students' affective learning may begin to shed more light on our understanding of why nonverbal immediacy cues enhance student affect.