As one of the important stakeholders in ecotourism, community residents play a crucial role in ecotourism development. This study takes interactive emotional cognition, social exchange theory and the concept of psychological carrying capacity as the guiding theories, and designs the community residents’ questionnaire from the aspects of emotional cognition and psychological carrying capacity, respectively. Correlation analysis and regression modeling were used to test the influence of interactive emotional cognition on the psychological carrying capacity of ecotourism community residents. The calculation results show that the psychological carrying capacity of ecotourism community residents is positively correlated with positive interactive emotional cognition (r>0) and negatively correlated with negative interactive emotional cognition (r<0). It was also found that community residents' proud emotional perception of tourism development had the highest degree of influence on the psychological adjustment capacity variable (R²=0.299). This study verifies the mechanism of community residents' interactive emotional cognition on their psychological carrying capacity and enriches the theoretical research on promoting ecotourism development.