Personality, basic emotions, and satisfaction: Primary emotions in the mountaineering experience

Consumption-related emotions – usually operationalized as broad, summary dimensions such as positive and negative emotions or, alternatively, pleasure and arousal – have been shown to be influenced by enduring personality traits and, in turn, to influence customer satisfaction. Experiential tourism activities such as mountaineering evoke powerful emotions that strongly influence tourist satisfaction. Although Zajonc (1980) proposed and more recent neurophysiological evidence confirms that emotions, especially fear, can be primary (can precede cognitions), consumption-related emotions have heretofore been modeled as occurring concurrently with or consequent to cognitive appraisals. Our results show that two basic consumption-related emotions, fear and joy, are influenced by neuroticism and extraversion, respectively, and in turn and in conjunction with cognitive appraisals influence tourist satisfaction. Joy has direct effects on satisfaction that are not mediated by cognitions; fear’s inverse effects on satisfaction are fully mediated by cognitions. These findings extend understandings of trait/basic-emotion relationships and of basic emotions’ roles in satisfaction formation and also, importantly, demonstrate an instance of primary consumer emotions.