Fear or Joy?Study on the Emotional Experience of Recreational Fear Space
Fear,as a typical negative emotion,can frighten people.Meanwhile,fear can also attract brave man to involve into some recreational activities with scene of horror.That is the Fear Paradox that people are willing to approach fear and acquire joy from these recreational fear activities.Although recreational fear activities have gradually become a kind of leisure choice for tourists,and a number of new industries have been spawned,the current research mainly focuses on the description of phenomena and lacks the analysis of process mechanism.The research on the transformation process of individual emotions in recreational fear activities plays a key role in revealing the nature of the Fear Paradox.Therefore,taking virtual reality(VR)horror games as the research context,this paper invited 18 respondents who ever played recreational fear activities to participate in a VR horror game offline.Through observation and in-depth interviews,researchers recorded the performance of the respondents in the game,and interviewed them after the game.After the interviews,this paper made a thematic analysis of the text materials based on the cognitive appraisal theory of emotion,so as to explore the emotional experience process of tourists in the recreational fear activities.The results showed that tourists arouse four basic emotions in VR horror games:fear,joy,interest and surprise.The arousal and transformation process of these emotions comes from tourists'cognitive evaluation of external stimuli.And the cognitive evaluation of tourists can be divided into two stages:preliminary evaluation and secondary evaluation.First of all,before the games,the tourists are influenced by the imaginative stimulus to generate expectation and joy for the unknown game experience.Joy can form a kind of motivation,encourage tourists to enter the game space.When they enter the game space,tourists are exposed to the actual horror of the games.At this time,tourists stress out their preliminary evaluation.The preliminary evaluation can make them judge that they are in a dangerous situation,thus arousing strong fear and surprise.With time and behavior adaptation,tourists gradually form secondary evaluation.This evaluation can make them gradually realize that they are in a safe environment and immerse themselves into the game,thus arousing a coexisting emotional state of fear,surprise,joy and interest.This paper constructs the framework of individual emotional experience in VR horror games.Through this framework,the paper proves that there is a dynamic interactive relationship between the cognitive evaluation and emotional experience of tourists in the recreational fear activities.And this interaction is the key to the arousal and transformation of different emotions when tourists play,which provides a new angle for the research of emotional experience in the field of tourism and leisure.At the same time,this paper focuses on the analysis between fear and joy,and reveals that they are in a dynamic interaction process of different intensity in the recreational fear activities,thus making a further exploration and explanation of the Fear Paradoxfrom the micro level.
recreational fearcognitive appraisal theory of emotionemotional experiencehorror gamevirtual reality(VR)
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