Understanding both expressed and evoked emotions is critical for multimodal large language models (MLLMs) to achieve comprehensive affect-aware interactions. However, existing benchmarks typically examine expressed and evoked emotions in isolation or are constrained to coarse-grained and incomplete affective characterizations.

To bridge this gap, we introduce E$^3$mo-Bench, a scalable benchmark comprising $12{,}314$ question-answer pairs across $2{,}524$ videos with predefined affective perspectives. It evaluates evoked and expressed emotion understanding via $3$ complementary tasks: emotion perception, open-vocabulary recognition, and valence-arousal-dominance (VAD) assessment.

To efficiently scale reliable continuous annotations, we propose Bayesian Pairwise Alignment, which aggregates sparse, low-burden pairwise judgments into anchor-referenced VAD estimates. Furthermore, we develop E$^3$mo-Score, a training-free agent that aggregates complementary judgments from a five-model committee to improve VAD estimation.

Extensive experiments validate the effectiveness of our framework and expose a pronounced performance skew between evoked and expressed emotion paradigms. These findings, coupled with MLLMs' persistent deficits in fine-grained recognition and dimensional assessment, chart a clear course for advancing multimodal emotional intelligence.