Minwei Deng, Xiaoli Li, Han Zhang, Baiqing Sun
The adoption of social media has significantly propelled the development of the tourism industry, with an increasing number of tourists sharing positive travel experiences online. Based on the Emotional Contagion Theory and the Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions, this study examines the mechanisms through which emotional valence and arousal in tourism experiences influence comment volume, while exploring the moderating roles of emoji and hashtag usage. Employing an approach that combines the BERT model with the Chinese EMObank to conduct sentiment analysis on large-scale field data from Weibo and construct a negative binomial regression model. Empirical results reveal that both emotional valence and arousal positively impact comment volume, with valence demonstrating a stronger effect. Emojis positively moderate the influence of emotional valence rather than arousal, whereas hashtags amplify the effect of emotional arousal. This study contributes to understanding the potential spillover effects of sharing tourism experiences on social media and provides managerial insights for tourism stakeholders.