A Comparative Analysis of Self-Report and Psychophysiological Measures of Emotion in the Context of Tourism Advertising

Abstract

This study investigates the influence of emotional responses evoked by destination television advertisements on three common variables of interest when assessing tourism advertising effectiveness: attitude toward the advertisement, postexposure destination attitude and visit intention. In particular, this study used a combination of self-report and psychophysiological measures of emotion and explored the consistency between these two measurement techniques. A total of 101 participants were exposed to 18 existing destination commercials while their real-time psychophysiological responses and self-report data were collected. The results show that the influence of ad-evoked emotions on tourism advertising effectiveness varied according to the way emotion was measured. The effects of pleasure on tourism advertising effectiveness were much weaker when pleasure was measured physiologically than when self-report measures were used. Physiological arousal, however, was not found to be a significant indicator of advertising effectiveness. The results highlight the importance of valid and reliable measurement of emotion and raise concern over the possible overestimation of the relationship between self-reported emotional responses and advertising effectiveness.

Residents’ attitudes to tourism: a review

“…This could utilise mixed methods to provide both subjective and objective analyses of residents' perceptions. For example, future research can use psycho-physiological tools such as electro-dermal analysis (EDA) or facial electromyography (EMG) (Li et al, 2017) to measure emotional responses coupled with self-report surveys.…”

Emotions as core building blocks of an experience

“…Researchers in our field are beginning to see the potential in using physiological signals to measure the emotional component of experiences. In a lab setting, Li et al (2016Li et al ( , 2017 used facial EMG and SCR to measure emotional responses while study participants watched tourism destination advertisements. The researchers observed that physiological measures show reliable emotions that are consistent with post hoc interviews (Li et al, 2016) and further observed that the physiological effects of watching advertisements were weaker than self-reports of emotion, which suggests that self-reports may overestimate emotional responses (Li et al, 2017).…”

Emotions in Tourism: Theoretical Designs, Measurements, Analytics, and Interpretations

“…Other techniques such as storytelling (Schank 1990) Some studies attempt to compare and contrast verbal, nonverbal, and indirect qualitative emotion measures in tourism. Li et al (2018a) use self-report and psychophysiological techniques (facial EMG and skin conductance) to measure emotional responses to DMOs' advertisements. They show that self-report overestimates the effect of pleasure on advertising effectiveness.…”

“…Our article contributes to theoretical advancement by summarizing, integrating, and structuring extant knowledge across multiple literature streams. Theoretical and measurement issues relating to emotions appear in places but in piecemeal fashion in tourism (e.g., Kim and Fesenmaier 2015;Li et al 2018a). The present study brings together the fragmented literature, identify common grounds, and propose an enhanced conceptualization of emotion.…”