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.

Keywords:

• tourist emotion
• emotion measurement
• self-report
• psychophysiological measurement of emotion

Acknowledgments

The authors thank the editor and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions. The first author also acknowledges the financial support provided by the China Scholarship Council (CSC) during his Ph.D. study at the University of Queensland.