Current and potential methods for measuring emotion in tourism experiences: a review
Abstract
This study provides an assessment of methods used in existing tourism research to measure emotion and discusses the potential for use of psychophysiological methods such as electro-dermal analysis, facial muscle activity, heart rate response, eye-tracking system and vascular measures. Psychophysiological measurement techniques have been reported in the marketing, advertising and media literature; however, to the best knowledge of the authors, no studies are reported in the tourism literature. Instead, studies of emotion in the tourism literature invariably employ self-report questionnaire methods which capture only tourists' high-order emotions and are subject to a variety of forms of bias. Unconscious emotional responses that can provide unbiased portrayal of individuals' initial emotional reactions when exposed to a stimulus have been largely ignored. The paper concludes that studies combining both self-report and psychophysiological measures are needed and areas for future research are discussed.
Journal Title
Current Issues in Tourism
Copyright Statement
© 2014 Taylor & Francis (Routledge). This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in Current Issues in Tourism on 05 Nov 2014, available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13683500.2014.975679
Subject
Tourist Behaviour and Visitor Experience