A Research On Rural Tourists’ Emotion Experience And Its Generative Mechanism

Emotional experience is the core of tourist experience and the fundamental driving force for tourists to travel.However,due to the ambiguity and complexity of emotion itself,previous studies have paid little attention to it.With the in-depth development of tourism industry and the increasing depth of tourists’ experience,rural areas has been more and more recognized as an emotional experience space by the mass tourists,especially in the post-urbanization era.Rural tourists not only pursue the pleasant experience of both body and mental,but also a feeling of nostalgia and homesick.When the practice has occurred,the academic researches should try to explain it.In recent years,there has been an "emotional turn" in tourism research,while little in-depth exploration has been paid to the rural tourists’ emotional experience as well as an systematic analysis of what and how the tourists’ emotional experience occur.Under this background,we try to get more knowledge of the proper definition and the connotation of rural tourist’s emotional experience as well as the occurrence process and Realization Mechanism of rural tourists’ emotional experience in the cultural context of China,so as to construct and reveal the theoretical research system of rural tourists’ emotional experience and to provide rationalization interpretation for the current universal phenomenon of tourists returning to the countryside.Emotion is the core concept of many disciplines.The study of this subject usually draws on the theories of sociology and psychology.Undertaking constructivism perspective and the phenomenology and hermeneutics explanation methods,we use Bourdieu’s field theory as the main survey evidence,together with interaction theory and psychological S-O-R theory,to systematically analyses the connotation and essence,occurrence process and Realization Mechanism of rural tourists’ emotional experience.Through the systematic research,this paper mainly got the following conclusions:Firstly,on the basis of literature reading,the concept and connotation of emotional and emotional experience are clarified,and the essence of emotional experience of rural tourists is analyzed from the perspective of field.Emotional experience is the core motivation and key factor for rural tourists to travel.Firstly,from an individual point of view,the emotional experience of rural tourists is a process of interaction occurred between the rural tourists and the tangible and intangible elements with emotional value in rural tourism destination.Secondly,when we see it as a social phenomenon,the rural tourists’ emotional experience is a prevalent subjective social reality.It is caused by millions of rural tourists who has different social demographic characteristics as well as a variety of motivations,cultural genes,capital and habitus.They paid a certain amount of economic capital in order to get the emotional experience.(3)The emotional experience of rural tourists is not only the result of the interaction between tourists and the environment,the scenery,the people and the atmosphere in the rural tourism destination,but also a result of the emotional potential energy flow between urban life field and rural tourism field.Secondly,with the support of S-O-R theory,we use Zaltman’s metaphor extraction technology(ZMET)to extract the psychological chains and the mental map model of typical rural tourists’ emotional experience,and systematically present the concrete process of rural tourists’ emotional experience.Rural tourists’ emotional experience is the subjective result of tourists’ internal evaluation of rural emotional stimuli which entered into their perception range.There are four kinds of rural object elements which cause tourists’ emotional perception: landscape elements,relationship elements,atmosphere elements and activity elements.(2)Tourists’ evaluate the object attributes and the value attributes of the emotional stimulus factors,they would judge the authenticity and rurality of what they found.This two judgment are vital determination of their emotional results which will appear in a very short time.In the process of emotional evaluation,rural tourists show some obvious characteristics,such as: " a coexistence of sensibility and rationality in value evaluation","an equal emphasis on secular pleasure and spiritual pursuit in value pursuit" and "a coexistence of representation and non-representation in their value acquisition".(3)Through internal cognition and evaluation,tourists usually obtained nine types of emotional experience,including sense of joy,beauty,nostalgic,security,escape,integration,surprise,love as well as the negative emotional experience.All of these different types of emotional feelings together point to the tourists’ deep demand for "home feeling".Thirdly,we use grounded theory to extract the key concepts of rural tourists’ emotional experience.Guided by the field theory and Turner’s comprehensive emotional research paradigm,this paper makes a theoretical interpretation of the realization mechanism of rural tourists’ emotional experience,and verifies its correctness by UGC data.The realization of rural tourists’ emotions is influenced by many macro-forces in the society,such as the social cultural system and social stratification system,at the inter-media level,the tourists’ urban daily life field plays an important role in the realization of tourists’ emotional experience.These factors play an important role by distributing power and status among the emotional subjects who are involved in the interactive process.Also these Macro meso strengths endowed the rural tourist different capital habitus,which will play an important role when he interacts with the rural tourism environment.Modernity constraints in urban daily life emerged as the push factor and life patterns in rural areas which are more in line with the biological and cultural needs of people as the pull factor,both of them promoted the motivation of urban people to go to the countryside.Destination deliberately constructs a stage-oriented rural tourism field to meet the motivations and demands of urban tourists with different capital and habitus to seek emotional energy in the countryside.(2)On the micro-scale,the emotion subject interact continually with the objects which contains lots of emotional information during their stay in the rural tourism field.This interaction is the realization mechanism of rural tourists’ emotional experience Rural tourists with different social demographic characteristics,habitus and capital intake emotional object information through gaze,embodiment and imagination in the artificially constructed rural tourism field,and evaluate the emotional value of the objects by means of comparison,empathy,metaphorical cognition and insight.Under the condition of certain distance and scale,the subjects and the objects achieve rhythmic connection.The emotional meaning of the object breaks through different subject interfaces,thus causing the subject’s perception of meaning and the presentation of real self.The emotional subject eventually discovers and promotes the self in the emotional relationship,and thus the generation of emotion has the value and attribute in the sense of existentialism.This study has a certain theoretical innovation.It not only pays attention to the essence of tourists’ emotional experience in the content of the study,but also breaks through the single perspective of emotional research.It systematically synthesizes the macro and micro elements of tourists’ emotional experience by using field theory.On the whole,this paper focuses on the analysis of the ontological elements of tourists’ emotional experience,establishes a theoretical analysis model of tourists’ emotional experience,by doing these research work,we enriches the theoretical system of tourists’ emotional research and tourists’ experience research in China.The study has certain guiding significance for the tourism practice.In the future,rural tourism products should pay more attention to urban people’s emotional appeals,increase the interactions between subject and object,and pay more attention to the construction of rural emotional image.There are still many omissions in this study,for example,many meaningful topics have not been captured,as well as many in-depth explorations about the emotional experience of the rural tourists has been missed.Future research needs more diversified research methods to refine,differentiate and compare tourists’ emotional experience.