This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: The impact of sustainability messages may depend not only on their content but also on the order in which they are presented. The emotional response created by one message may influence how people interpret the next message about green initiatives.
In tourism, where visitors are frequently encouraged to make environmentally responsible choices, understanding how these emotional responses unfold could help organizations design more effective sustainability communication. Environmental communication often presents the problem and the solution as separate messages. However, people may perceive environmental messages as a sequence, first learning about environmental harm, then encountering possible solutions.
This raises the possibility that an initial negative emotion could influence how a subsequent positive message is perceived. To investigate this process, professor Insin Kim and Dr. Alisa Kazakova of Pusan National University collaborated with Dr.
Marcel Bastiaansen of Breda University of Applied Sciences and Tilburg University in the Netherlands to examine how emotional responses unfold across successive stages of green persuasion. The researchers developed a stage-based emotional processing framework that clarifies the distinct roles of arousal and valence in processing sustainability messages. The paper was published in the Journal of Travel & Tourism Marketing.
The researchers tested their framework in two complementary studies combining neural and behavioral evidence, focusing on arousal and valence as distinct emotional attributes. In Study 1, a 64-channel electroencephalography experiment showed that prior exposure to tourism-related environmental degradation heightened early attention and sustained neural engagement with green solutions presented afterward. In Study 2, the same negative-to-positive message sequence produced a contrast-based positive shift in emotional valence, which in turn increased the intention to engage in pro-environmental behavior.
The findings showed that emotional arousal and valence play distinct roles during persuasion. Arousal seemed to facilitate early attention and message processing, but it did not directly influence participants' intention to engage in pro-environmental behavior. Valence-based evaluation emerged as the primary factor associated with later judgment and behavioral intention.
Extract — continue reading at the source.
