Emotional dynamics of virtual reality tourism experience: An application of day reconstruction and physiological methods

Abstract

This study investigates how the succession of real-time emotions during a virtual reality tourism experience can shape the retrospective assessment of such experience. A total of 363 participants were exposed to a virtual reality tourism experience while their self-report and skin conductance data were collected. Results reveal that average pleasure dominates peak and end moments in driving consumers' post-viewing evaluation of virtual reality tourism experience. Meanwhile, the time to emotional arousal peak was found to be a significant predictor of consumers' visit intention in the virtual reality tourism setting. The findings advance our understanding of how individuals assess virtual reality destination experience on the basis of moment-to-moment affective data and extend the literature on emotional dynamics and virtual reality tourism.