The influence of eliciting awe on pro-environmental behavior of tourist in religious tourism

An Integrative Model of Tourists’ Pro-Environmental Behavior Based on the Dual Path of Rational Planning and Embodied Emotion

“…Research has confirmed that anger, empathy, guilt, place attachment, and other emotional factors all had significant effects on individual pro-environmental behaviors [80][81][82][83][84]. With the development of urbanization, people hope to regain their emotional connections to nature, and the relationship between people and nature is deeply considered in research as emotional factors such as awe of nature [85], NC [20,86], and natural empathy [81,87] receive more attention. Especially in the post-COVID pandemic era, a growing number of scholars have been showing interest in environmental emotional factors [88,89].…”

The wow effect and behavioral intentions of tourists to astrotourism experiences: Mediating effects of satisfaction

“…Yet, the valence approach (positive and negative emotions) remains prioritized as a way of measuring emotions, with discrete emotions, including self-transcendent emotions such as awe being sparsely researched (Wang et al, 2021). In contrast to previous studies focusing on how awe is triggered in various special interest tourism segments and its consequences (Pearce et al, 2017;Wang & Lyu, 2019;Yan & Jia, 2021), we show that awe is triggered in astrotourism experiences and, therefore, confirm Stone's (2018) suggestion that a starry sky does induce a sense of wonder in tourists, which contributes to the overview or wow effect (Yaden et al, 2016). Thus, in addition to joy, love, and positive surprise (Hosany & Gilbert, 2010), which have been described as the core discrete positive emotions in tourism experiences, we demonstrate the importance of awe as a discrete emotion in astrotourism experiences.…”

“…Based on the cognitive appraisal theory (Lazarus, 1991) and prototype theory (Keltner & Haidt, 2003), awe is elicited when an individual makes a cognitive evaluation on the external environment. Although Lazarus (1991) suggests that awe is a dynamic mental state with either positive or negative emotional valence, research in the tourism field has primarily considered and evaluated awe as a positive emotional state (Wang et al, 2021; Yan & Jia, 2021), although it can elicit fear (Pearce et al, 2017). Coghlan et al (2012) argue that in tourism experiences, awe has three components (physiological, comparative uniqueness and schema‐changing).…”

“…We provide evidence of how the discrete positive emotion of awe affects tourists' post‐consumption behaviors. Existing studies on awe typically focus on this positive emotion elicited from exposure to advertisements (Septianto, Seo, et al, 2021; Septianto, Ye, & Northey, 2021) and tourism experiences related to dark tourism (Wang et al, 2021), spiritual and religious tourism (Moal‐Ulvoas, 2017; Yan & Jia, 2021), and nature‐based tourism (Pearce et al, 2017; Wang & Lyu, 2019), with astrotourism and, specifically, night sky observation being a significant omission.…”

“…The contributions of this study are two‐fold. First, awe as an emotion is under‐researched in tourism studies (Coghlan et al, 2012; Wang et al, 2021), with existing studies measuring awe using: (1) semantic items such as unimpressed/memorable (Wang et al, 2021) and arrogant/humbling (Lu et al, 2017); (2) key words such as “amazing, inspiring, unusual, breathtaking, motivating, humbling” (Coghlan et al, 2012) and; (3) uni‐dimensional scales (Wang & Lyu, 2019; Yan & Jia, 2021) that do not recognize the concept's multi‐dimensionality. Others identify awe in tourism experiences using qualitative approaches (Pearce et al, 2017).…”