Emotions as Core Building Blocks of an Experience

Flashcards on emotions as core building blocks of experiences in the hospitality, tourism, and leisure industries.

Purpose of Research Paper

Aims to stimulate the discussion in the fields of hospitality, tourism and leisure on what exactly constitutes “an experience” and how to measure it by unpacking the experience construct into its core constituent elements, namely, emotions.

Definition of Experiences

Experiences are a fine-grained temporal succession of emotions that occur during an experiential episode.

Practical implications

Companies can get a more fine-grained image of what impacts customers over the course of their experience and to actively integrate the use of emotions into creating experiences, as emotions are key to making them memorable.

Originality/value

An emerging framework that unpacks memorable experiences into their constituent element – emotions, contributing to a deeper understanding of how consumers experience offerings in the hospitality, tourism and leisure industry.

Theoretical efforts within hospitality, tourism, and leisure

Listing a widely varying number of experience dimensions, which are heavily dependent on specific settings and contexts.

Central Theory of Experience

Emotions form the key ingredient of an experience.

Key Determination of Experience Evaluation

The succession of instantaneous emotional responses during an experience (occurring in the subsecond range) that determines how it is evaluated and remembered.

Peak experiences

Short in duration and accompanied by intense positive emotions and feelings of affection, leading to a person transcending ordinary reality and losing track of time and place.

Experiences Defined

Commodities are fungible, goods tangible, services intangible, and experiences memorable.

Measuring experiences

Without practical ways of measuring the effects of their experiences, managers are ill-equipped for knowing whether their efforts are generating improvement.

Experiential Episodes

Our stream of consciousness is being divided into episodes through the activation of mental models, schemata, or knowledge stored in episodic memory.

Prime candidate constituents of experiences

Attention directs our mental resources to stimuli that are perceived as being salient; involvement refers to a person’s level of interest and personal relevance in relation to the staged offerings at a site or destination; engagement is a complex construct involving multiple mental processes, all related to the feeling of being “in the moment”.

Immersion

The sensation of being surrounded by a completely other reality and is most prominently studied in the context of gaming and virtual reality.

Theoretical implications

Researchers in our field should focus more on establishing exactly how and under which conditions emotions shape experiences and should become more aware of research methods that go beyond the traditional toolbox used for studying the cognitive appraisal of experiences and adopt additional methods that are more suitable for studying the temporal dynamics of emotional responses during an experience.

Affective elements

Researchers should focus more on establishing exactly how and under which conditions emotions shape experiences.

Studying Experiences

The bodily expression of emotional responses measured through recordings of brain activity (electroencephalography, or EEG) and through biometric measures such as facial expression, heart rate and skin conductance.

Decoding emotions from facial expressions

Deriving information about emotions from observations, photographs, and videos of facial expressions based on the notion that the face is rich in emotional expression.

Fundamental psychophysiological research on physiological correlates of emotional experiences

Has demonstrated that certain physiological measures are especially sensitive to emotions.

Facial EMG

Recording the electrical activity (EMG) of facial muscles, which is a more invasive yet more sensitive way of decoding facial expressions.

Skin Conductance Response

Refers to changes (increases) in the skin’s ability to conduct electricity caused by an opening of the sweat glands; considered to be a reliable index of emotional arousal.

High-frequency HRV

The rate of firing of the vagus nerve, relates to individuals’ ability to return the body to a low-arousal state after an emotional stimulus, and can therefore also be used as a proxy for emotional arousal.

EEG Signals

EEG signals are based on the fact that brain activity operates by minute changes in electrical potential that travel from one nerve cell to another across the networks of the brain.

EEG oscillations and emotional engagement

10-Hz frequency band, usually referred to as alpha activity, have been shown to be larger over the left frontal part of the brain following positive emotions and over right frontal areas as a result of experiencing negative emotions.

Destination marketing stimuli

Assessed by quantifying changes in emotional responses elicited by pictures of the destination with ERPs.

best- practice, evidence-based approach to experience management

determining the specific emotion that a customer should feel at each touchpoint, followed by a (series of) cycle(s) involving the initial design of the experience, measuring which emotions are actually felt at which points in time, redesigning and optimizing the experience, and measuring the impact of the redesign through several iterations.