Organisations are more and more aware of the need to really understand the motives, needs and desires of their guests in order to be hospitable. Offering food in a physical environment is a service which influences how people feel. The two (pilot) studies presented in this paper resulted in a first step towards a quantitative instrument for measuring people’s experience: the effects of a culinary concept on the perceived experience of elderly living in a home for the elderly were measured. The instrument combines experience of service (staff, menu choice), environment (ambience and design), as well as emotions and products (food). Further research is needed to validate the instrument.
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This study assessed the effect of visitors' personality and emotional response on finding positive meaning in life and the intention to spread positive word of mouth. The sample (n = 260) consists of visitors to Sachsenhausen Memorial and Museum near Berlin. Findings indicate that the emotion of interest positively contributes to finding positive meaning in life and positive word of mouth. The effects of personality are marginal. Personality explains little of the variance in positive meaning and positive word of mouth. Emotional response accounts for 25% of the variance in finding positive meaning in life-in terms of finding personal benefit from the visit, controlled for personality. Despite the dominant negative emotional response, tourists find positive meaning in their visit. These findings correspond with those observed in studies on personal trauma and loss. Positive meaning could potentially contribute to adjustment processes to cope with what occurred. Future research should include address longer term effects on postvisit behavior.
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http://cts.som.surrey.ac.uk/publication/lets-say-goodbye-the-moralising-practices-of-gap-year-organisations-in-the-netherlands/wppa_open/Responding to the growing appeal of the gap year amongst young people, thehigher education sector, governmental institutions and, perhaps foremost, the tourismindustry are increasingly starting to realise the potential of promoting tourism as an arenawith moral status and codes, influencing society and individual lives in ‘new’, different andpowerful ways. Due to this burgeoning global and identifiable gap year industry, the networkof public and private organisations, support services, practices and beliefs has becomeincreasingly open to scrutiny. This paper aims to contribute to a new research agendaexploring the broader cultural influence of the gap year industry in the Netherlands through adiscourse analysis of online resources targeting young people. In particular, the paperexplores the moralising practices of gap year organisations involved in promoting,negotiating and regulating new moral values and meanings of, and through, tourism. Thepaper concludes with a critical impression of how these organisations claim to offer a moredistinctive way of reflection, and thereby contribute to negative and narrowed views on masstourism and, in all likelihood, a distorted sense of global citizenship amongst young people.
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-Chatbots are being used at an increasing rate, for instance, for simple Q&A conversations, flight reservations, online shopping and news aggregation. However, users expect to be served as effective and reliable as they were with human-based systems and are unforgiving once the system fails to understand them, engage them or show them human empathy. This problem is more prominent when the technology is used in domains such as health care, where empathy and the ability to give emotional support are most essential during interaction with the person. Empathy, however, is a unique human skill, and conversational agents such as chatbots cannot yet express empathy in nuanced ways to account for its complex nature and quality. This project focuses on designing emotionally supportive conversational agents within the mental health domain. We take a user-centered co-creation approach to focus on the mental health problems of sexual assault victims. This group is chosen specifically, because of the high rate of the sexual assault incidents and its lifetime destructive effects on the victim and the fact that although early intervention and treatment is necessary to prevent future mental health problems, these incidents largely go unreported due to the stigma attached to sexual assault. On the other hand, research shows that people feel more comfortable talking to chatbots about intimate topics since they feel no fear of judgment. We think an emotionally supportive and empathic chatbot specifically designed to encourage self-disclosure among sexual assault victims could help those who remain silent in fear of negative evaluation and empower them to process their experience better and take the necessary steps towards treatment early on.
