Research On The Dynamics And Change Mechanism Of Tourist Emotions

People are not vegetation, we cannot live without emotions. While the stimulation changes during a travel, the psychology of tourist changes. Tourists can have a variety of positive or negative emotions, such as excitement, pleasure, sad, angry, regret, etc. These emotions not only constitute the important experience of tourists, but also have a great impact on tourist behaviors and well-being. Since the 21 st century, emotions study in tourism has emerged as a new perspective and an important field in the western academic society. Contrastively, this topic has not got enough attention of Chinese scholars. Compared with the richness of tourist emotions in reality, the academic research of them is relatively poor and lack of integral and further research.Given that Taiwan is a typical tourist destination in arousing tourist emotions, the research objects of this thesis are mainland tourists to Taiwan, with the purpose of detailed analyzing tourist emotions. It intends to answer the dynamics and change mechanism of tourist emotions. Specifically, there are three research problems: 1) what’s the basic characteristics of tourism market from mainland tourists to Taiwan? 2) What specific emotions do tourists have in Taiwan? Do these emotions change over the course of the travel? 3) How do these emotions emerge, develop and make functions? What’s the general mechanism of changes of tourist emotions? Guided by these questions, the paper combines the quantitative and qualitative studies. First, by participant observation, semi-structured diary and in-depth interview, it collects 158 diaries in valid and 3 travels, interviews 14 tourists. Then, it analyzes the data using content analysis, repeated-measures analysis of variance and interpretative phenomenological analysis. The main findings are as follows:1) As for mainland tourists, Taiwan has full of charm and it’s a popular tourist destination. Before travel, history and politics, music, performing arts and literature are the main media the mainland people understand Taiwan.2) During the course of travel, mainland tourists mainly have positive and neutral emotions, such as come down in one continuous line, root homology, affection, respect, warm and friendly, negative emotions seldom appear, such as guilt, fear, contempt, shame, embarrassment, rejection, ashamed, indifference, alienation, etc. During different travel stages, 36 emotions changes significantly. In stage 1, expected emotions and negative emotions have a relatively high intensity, real emotions and retrospective emotions are low. From stage 2 to 4, positive emotions reach a peak and then decrease, negative emotions fall to the bottom. In strage 5, expected emotions reduce to the minimum, real, retrospective and negative emotions rebound. In addition, a specific tourism stimulus will break the basic trends, and demographic characteristics will also affect some specific emotions.3) Before travel, education, music, literature, film, etc. construct mainland tourists’ imagine emotions to Taiwan, in which “political” and “beautiful environment” are two prominent. During the course of travel, they verify their imagination through six elements of tourism and form a series of real emotions. What impresses mainland tourists most is “full of human feelings”. After travel, they review the hasty travel and form retrospective emotions, in which “political alienation” and “cultural close” are two main. Induction, before travel, all kinds of mass media shape tourists imagine emotions and the initial image of tourism destination. During the course of travel, tourists go to verify and explore their imaginations; they produce a series of real emotions. Besides, the objective conditions, interpersonal relationships and personal situation will have impact on these emotions. After travel, by aftertaste and thinking, tourists have retrospective emotions and form a reconstructed image of the destination. What’s more, the retrospective emotions can also influence themselves, interpersonal relationship and the whole society.