Guest Editors

Jie Gao, San Jose State University (USA) jie.gao@sjsu.edu
Tom Baum, University of Strathclyde (UK) t.g.baum@strath.ac.uk
Crystal Shi, The Hong Kong Polytechnic University (HK) crystal.shi@polyu.edu.hk
Shanshi Li, Xiamen University (PRC) lss20170727@xmu.edu.cn

Background and rationale for this special issue

Affect, emotion, mood, and feeling lie at the core of human experience, shaping how individuals perceive, interact with, and respond to the world around them. Decades of research affirm their centrality in judgment and decision-making (Mullen & Johnson, 2013; Pham et al., 2001), yet tourism and hospitality scholarship still lacks a unified theoretical framework that explains how these affective processes related to one another (Godovykh & Tasci, 2022) or how they operate across the diverse constellation of stakeholders who animate service experiences. This special issue seeks to advance that agenda by systematizing the theory of affect, emotion, mood, and feeling across all human roles in tourism and hospitality.