THE POWER OF NEGATIVE EMOTIONS: THREE ESSAYS INVESTIGATING THEIR INFLUENCE ON EXPERIENCE MEMORABILITY AND TOURIST BEHAVIOR

Abstract

Through three standalone essays, this dissertation addresses the current gap in tourism and hospitality literature on negative emotions. Existing literature prioritizes positive emotions over negative emotions (Nawijn & Biran, 2019) even though tourists experience both types of emotions in their consumption of tourism and hospitality services. Moreover, a theoretical understanding of negative emotions is not as simple as dichotomizing findings regarding positive emotions as both emotion types are theoretically distinct (Taylor, 1991) and hence, warrants further investigation. Essay 1 focuses on negative memorable tourism experiences. It employed an exploratory, mixed-methods approach towards the understanding of negative MTEs by identifying their accompanying range of negative emotions, associated contexts of occurrence and relevant emotion appraisal criteria. Data utilized included online user-generated contents crawled from Reddit.com and survey responses collected via qualitative and quantitative survey questions. Essay 2 examines tourists’ emotional and behavioral responses to different types of hotel crises. In conceptualizing how tourists react to crises, essay 2 presumed the central role of crisis typology. It built upon brand harm literature to conceptualize and validate a model that incorporated (i) negative emotions and tourist attitude as parallel mediators of the relationship between crisis typology and behavioral intentions of tourists, and (ii) Schwartz’s (2012) personal values of hedonism and universalism as potential moderators. Results of an online experiment demonstrate that both negative emotions and tourist attitude significantly influence the relationship between crisis typology and behavioral intentions; however, only universalism significantly moderated the same relationship. With essay 1 demonstrating that negative emotions are remembered and essay 2 revealing the influence of negative emotions on tourist behavior, essay 3 evaluated the efficacy of emotion regulation strategies that tourists use to manage anger and fear while vacationing. Two emotion regulation strategies – i.e. reappraisal and suppression, each of which relate to specific steps in Gross’ five-step emotion generation process (Gross, 1998) – were assessed through five online experiments utilizing video and text stimuli. The first set of experiments was conducted within the context of destination crowding and then replicated via tourist harassment. Results across both contexts are consistent. Within-subject analysis revealed the efficacy of different emotion regulation strategies in improving subjective well-being: reappraisal (vs. suppression) significantly decreased (vs. increased) the intensity of anger and fear felt. Similar outcomes are noted in assessing tourists’ behavioral tendency with reappraisal (vs. suppression) significantly moderating the relationship between anger/fear and negative word-of-mouth such that the relationship is weaker (vs. stronger). Notably, both emotion regulation strategies did not moderate the relationship between fear and revisit intention.