Exploring tourists’ soundscape emotion and its impact on sustainable tourism development

ABSTRACT

Despite the long-standing appeal for tourism researchers to pay more attention to the effects of soundscape, there remains a serious lack of in-depth studies on the topic. Drawing on moderating effects of tourists’ soundscape emotion, this study examines certain determinants of tourists’ pro-environmental behaviour. Kulangsu was used as a source of empirical data for its abundant soundscape resources. The results revealed the explicit connections of human-environmental relationships to pro-environmental behaviour. All the paths are more significant when grouped with positive soundscape emotions than with their negative counterparts. This demonstrates the importance of soundscape to promote sustainable development in tourist destinations.

KEYWORDS:

• Soundscape
• pro-environmental behaviour
• connectedness to nature
• place attachment
• Kulangsu

Acknowledgement

The authors would also like to extend their appreciation to The Administrative Authority of Kulangsu for collaboration in data collection stage. Finally, we sincerely appreciate the anonymous reviewers’ insightful and constructive comments and suggestions on the previous version of this manuscript.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Funding

We are grateful to the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NSFC), and National Tourism Administration, through NSFC project [No. 41571136] and Ten thousands Tourism Talents Project [No. WMYC20171009]. We also gratefully acknowledge financial support from China Scholarship Council [No. 201706190151] (award to Mengyuan Qiu for six months’ visiting scholar research at the Griffith University).