恐惧还是愉悦?娱乐恐惧空间的情绪体验研究

Fear or Joy?Study on the Emotional Experience of Recreational Fear Space

恐惧通常会让人逃离,但恐惧的娱乐活动又经常能吸引人们参与,这就是恐惧悖论。文章通过邀请受访者参与虚拟现实恐怖游戏后接受深度访谈,借助情绪认知评价理论研究个体在娱乐恐惧空间中的情绪体验过程,以回应恐惧悖论。研究表明,游客在游戏中的情绪唤起源于对外部刺激的认知评价。该认知评价过程可分为初评价和次评价两个阶段。在游戏初期,游客在接收到恐怖刺激后会应激性地产生初评价,判断自己正处于危险环境中,从而唤起强烈的恐惧与惊奇情绪。随着时间与行为适应,游客会逐渐通过次评价形成一个安全性保护框架,并沉浸到游戏中,产生恐惧、惊奇、愉悦、兴趣并存的情绪状态。由此,文章构建出个体在娱乐恐惧空间中的情绪生成与转化过程框架,揭示了恐惧与愉悦在其中的互动转化过程,同时证明了个体的认知评价与情绪体验在娱乐恐惧空间中存在一种动态互动关系,从微观角度丰富旅游休闲领域中关于情绪体验的研究。

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 invited18 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 Paradox from the micro level.