Novelty in Memorable Tourism Experiences

Liubov Skavronskaya

doi:10.25907/00482

Tourism as a field of scholarly enquiry is informed from a range of different disciplinary perspectives, with psychology arguably one of the most intensly studied. Existing studies in tourism psychology, have tend to adopt a behavioural approach, leaving our understanding of the mental processes that underpin behaviour potentially underexplored and thus, conceptually underdeveloped. Theory from cognitive psychology, specifically Cognitive Appraisal Theory (CAT), presents potential to provide conceptual clarity of the antecedents of memorable tourism experiences (MTEs), a phenomenon of growing interest among tourism scholars. Subsequently, this thesis uses the process of cognitive appraisal to explore the memorability of tourism experiences, with particularly reference to the role of novelty in eliciting emotion. A constructivist approach was selected, consisting of two sequential stages of qualitative research. Stage One consisted of a series of semi-structured interviews with 25 participants, with 75 recalled episodes of novelty in MTEs. Stage Two utilised the social media platform WeChat, to further explore episodes of novelty and connection to emotion through sustained interaction with participants. WeChat mediated research resulted in the collection, coding and subsequent analysis of over 100 additional stories. Core findings from this research, detailed through a series of interconnected manuscripts, are outlined in the summary presented below. Analysis determined episodes of novelty can be re-evaluated through an ongoing process of cognitive appraisal during the recollection phase of the tourist experience. In addition, subsequent engagement with the eipsodes of novelty led to the proposition that the cognitive appraisal of novelty can be reconstructed from past emotional experiences, which are subject to change over time due to memory bias and distortion. Results identified goals are a critical driver of novelty, rather than dreams or fantasies. Connected to this, analysis determined that bottom up attention guided by goals and beliefs, plays a critical role in the appraisal of novelty due to the capacity of goals to guide future decision making and elicit emotions. Importantly, analysis highlighted the capacity of novelty to stimulate interactions between the different memory systems, both short- and long-term. Analysis of novelty elicited through the process of cognitive appraisal, generated conceptual guidance on how novelty, through the elicitation of emotion, facilitates memorability of the tourism experiences through long-term memory system and connection with emotions and goals. The findings above led to an important and timely contribution of this research, namely, the ability to conceptually distinguish novelty, surprise and unexpectedness in the context of the process of cognitive appraisal. Future studies should consider the role of emotional valence of MTE’s, specifically negative experiences and how these are re-evaluated overtime.

Novelty in Memorable Tourism Experiences

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