Real-Time Measurement of Tourists’ Objective and Subjective Emotions in Time and Space

Autonomic nervous system (ANS) activity is viewed as a major component of the emotion response in many recent theories of emotion. Positions on the degree of specificity of ANS activation in emotion, however, greatly diverge, ranging from undifferentiated arousal, over acknowledgment of strong response idiosyncrasies, to highly specific predictions of autonomic response patterns for certain emotions. A review of 134 publications that report experimental investigations of emotional effects on peripheral physiological responding in healthy individuals suggests considerable ANS response specificity in emotion when considering subtypes of distinct emotions. The importance of sound terminology of investigated affective states as well as of choice of physiological measures in assessing ANS reactivity is discussed. Copyright © 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.

Laypeople and scientists alike believe that they know anger, or sadness, or fear, when they see it. These emotions and a few others are presumed to have specific causal mechanisms in the brain and properties that are observable (on the face, in the voice, in the body, or in experience)-that is, they are assumed to be natural kinds. If a given emotion is a natural kind and can be identified objectively, then it is possible to make discoveries about that emotion. Indeed, the scientific study of emotion is founded on this assumption. In this article, I review the accumulating empirical evidence that is inconsistent with the view that there are kinds of emotion with boundaries that are carved in nature. I then consider what moving beyond a natural-kind view might mean for the scientific understanding of emotion.

Twenty-five adolescents reported their daily activities and the quality of their experiences for a total of 753 times during a normal week, in response to random beeps transmitted by an electronic paging device. In this sample adolescents were found to spend most of their time either in conversation with peers or in watching television. Negative affects were prevalent in most activities involving socialization into adult roles. Television viewing appears to be an affectless state associated with deviant behavior and antisocial personality traits. The research suggests the importance of a systemic approach which studies persons' activities and experiences in an ecological context. The experiential sampling method described in this paper provides a tool for collecting such systemic data.