Impact of spiritual values on tourists’ psychological wellbeing: evidence from China’s Buddhist mountains

Spiritual values can be a source of meaning for people, and can also determine their feelings, behavior, and mental health. In China’s Buddhist mountains, we collected a total of 400 valid questionnaires from Mount Putuo and Mount Jiuhua, and identified spiritual values as transcendence, general connectedness, inner balance, positive life direction, and special religious feelings. We also explored the impact of these spiritual values on tourists’ psychological wellbeing according to the PERMA model (positive emotion, engagement, relationships, meaning, and achievement). The results revealed that the more easily attained spiritual values (general connectedness, positive life direction, and special religious feelings) had a greater influence on psychological wellbeing than the less easily-attained spiritual values (transcendence and inner balance). Positive emotion and meaning, as components of psychological wellbeing, were strongly influenced by the four spiritual values, whereas engagement, accomplishment, and relationships were influenced by fewer spiritual values. The research contributes to the existing knowledge on spiritual values by analyzing their dimensions and relationships with tourists’ wellbeing from different levels, and also provides empirical suggestions for the sustainable development of religious tourism destinations

ETPNav: Evolving Topological Planning for Vision-Language Navigation in Continuous Environments

Vision-language navigation is a task that requires an agent to follow instructions to navigate in environments. It becomes increasingly crucial in the field of embodied AI, with potential applications in autonomous navigation, search and rescue, and human-robot interaction. In this paper, we propose to address a more practical yet challenging counterpart setting - vision-language navigation in continuous environments (VLN-CE). To develop a robust VLN-CE agent, we propose a new navigation framework, ETPNav, which focuses on two critical skills: 1) the capability to abstract environments and generate long-range navigation plans, and 2) the ability of obstacle-avoiding control in continuous environments. ETPNav performs online topological mapping of environments by self-organizing predicted waypoints along a traversed path, without prior environmental experience. It privileges the agent to break down the navigation procedure into high-level planning and low-level control. Concurrently, ETPNav utilizes a transformer-based cross-modal planner to generate navigation plans based on topological maps and instructions. The plan is then performed through an obstacle-avoiding controller that leverages a trial-and-error heuristic to prevent navigation from getting stuck in obstacles. Experimental results demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed method. ETPNav yields more than 10% and 20% improvements over prior state-of-the-art on R2R-CE and RxR-CE datasets, respectively. Our code is available at https://github.com/MarSaKi/ETPNav.Comment: Project page: https://github.com/MarSaKi/ETPNa

Out-of-Plane Piezoelectricity and Ferroelectricity in Layered α-In2Se3 Nanoflakes

Piezoelectric and ferroelectric properties in the two-dimensional (2D) limit are highly desired for nanoelectronic, electromechanical, and optoelectronic applications. Here we report the first experimental evidence of out-of-plane piezoelectricity and ferroelectricity in van der Waals layered α-In2Se3 nanoflakes. The noncentrosymmetric R3m symmetry of the α-In2Se3 samples is confirmed by scanning transmission electron microscopy, second-harmonic generation, and Raman spectroscopy measurements. Domains with opposite polarizations are visualized by piezo-response force microscopy. Single-point poling experiments suggest that the polarization is potentially switchable for α-In2Se3 nanoflakes with thicknesses down to ∼10 nm. The piezotronic effect is demonstrated in two-terminal devices, where the Schottky barrier can be modulated by the strain-induced piezopotential. Our work on polar α-In2Se3, one of the model 2D piezoelectrics and ferroelectrics with simple crystal structures, shows its great potential in electronic and photonic applications

Journey of sacredness: assessing how commercial activities in China affect religious tourists' spiritual values

This thesis is concerned with the commercialization of religious sites and tourists' spiritual values. The studies also explore the effects of religious commercialization on tourists' spiritual values. To answer the research questions and topics, considerable data, comprising 80 interviews, 438 blogs and 800 questionnaires, were collected and analyzed. The thesis has seven chapters in total. The first chapter introduces the global development of religious tourism. Two core concepts, religious commercialization and spiritual values, are then discussed and clarified. This chapter also presents the research questions, aims and procedures. A second chapter reviews much highly relevant literature. It consists of five sections: global religious tourism, Chinese religious tourism, religious commercialization, tourist experience, and spiritual values. This chapter provides a basis for research on commercialization and the tourist experience, and aims to better understand the relationships between religious commercialization and tourists' spiritual values as identified in previous studies. The third chapter introduces the research methodology and the location of the studies. This chapter describes the Four Great Buddhist Mountains (FGBMs) in China, and then discusses the relevant methods and methodological framework of the research. An emphasis is placed on using multiple methods to enrich the work. The fourth chapter evaluates the level of commercialization at the FGBMs. Both qualitative and quantitative tools were employed to assess tourists' attitudes towards different types of commercial activity. The commercial activities can be identified in three domains and divided into seven categories. The results were discussed and then this study built a model about religious commercialization. It was found that food and drinks, shopping, and accommodation were the most commercial categories. Many tourists were influenced by the shopping stores, street stalls, and mobile vendors. Some behaviours, such as indeterminate price, bad service and forced consumption, made tourists feel annoyed. The fifth chapter tries to assess tourists' spiritual values in religious places. Interviews and a survey were selected as the research methods. The interview analysis was used to investigate tourists' subjective themes about spiritual values. And the objective survey analysis was employed to extract factors of spiritual values and measure their relative importance. The extracted factors of spiritual values are transcendence, general connectedness, inner balance, positive life direction, and specific religious feelings. The sixth chapter explores how commercial activities in religious places affect tourists' spiritual values. Two kinds of interviews were conducted at the FGBMs. The first interview focuses on tourists' perceived level of religious commercialization and spiritual values, and how commercial activities affect their feelings. The second interview tried to understand the general impression of religious tourists towards destination images and ascertain the factor influencing their views. The second objective assists in contextualising the relative importance of commercialization in the overall views of a destination. It was found that Tourists' spiritual values were enhanced by others' Buddhist beliefs, devoted acts, traditional rituals, cultural architectures, and natural features. But many commercial activities, nonstandard staff services, low quality of tourism products, and environmental pollution appeared to negatively affect tourists' impressions on religious sites. Finally the last chapter considers the key points from the research findings. These findings contribute to the academic literature, and practical management for religious tourism. In addition, this chapter reviews the limitations of the current studies, and proposes directions for further research. Further, the trajectory of religious tourism development in China has been predicted. Some possible opportunities and challenges for developing religious tourism sustainably are highlighted

Insights about the commercialisation of religious tourism: four great Buddhist mountains in China

Commercial activities are emerging at different religious sites and the practices arouse global concern. This study defines and assesses commercial activities at religious sites and explores how they affect tourists' attitudes. The well-known Four Great Buddhist Mountains in China were selected as research sites. Using grounded theory, this study initially conducted 14 detailed interviews to build an understanding of commercialisation and then investigated 438 valid travel blogs. The resulting seven commercial categories are entrance ticket, food & beverage, accommodation, transportation, shopping, staff service and entertainment. According to both subjective interview and objective mean analysis on each category, level of commercialisation for all research sites were assessed. The findings showed that religious tourists had more negative comments on food and beverage, with less criticism of accommodation and shopping

Visitors' perceptions of religious tourism destinations

This paper addresses the question of how contemporary visitors perceive the more commercial facets of religious destinations. The Four Great Buddhist Mountains of China provided subtly different contexts for the work, but the themes addressed have a broad applicability to the tensions between secular and spiritual features of such sites. Two rounds of detailed interviews in 2014 and 2016 were undertaken. The first identified four types of Buddhist site images: sacred with high spiritual values, cultural with long histories, attractive with natural features, and commercial with shops and restaurants. The second found that visitors' perceptions of these types of destination image contained both strong cognitive and affective reactions to the Buddhist sites. Such perceptions were strengthened by key site features such as an impressive atmosphere, attractive environment, personal beliefs, and loyal behaviors, but weakened by commercial activities, modern buildings, environmental pollution, and secular behaviors. The findings contribute to both theory and practice by clarifying the factors influencing visitors' perceptions about these Buddhist sites and providing further implications for the sustainable development of religious tourism

Are Tourism Practitioners Happy? The Role of Explanatory Style Played on Tourism Practitioners’ Psychological Well-Being

Research on tourism has gradually focused on the study of well-being, but relatively little attention has been paid to the psychological well-being of tourism practitioners. This study adopted the theoretical lens of explanatory style and the PERMA model (P = positive emotion, E = engagement, R = relationships, M = meaning, A = accomplishment) to investigate the influence of tourism practitioners’ explanatory style on their psychological well-being (PWB). The survey study demonstrated that explanatory style was significantly related to PWB; whilst an optimistic explanatory style was positively related to PWB, a pessimistic explanatory style was negatively related to it. Additionally, in the context of Chinese culture, tourism practitioners were inclined to attribute PWB to internal, stable, and specific causes. This study falls within the extensive field of occupational health psychology and theoretically contributes to the literature by connecting positive psychology and its effects on practitioners in the tourism context. Meanwhile, there are similarities and differences between the PWB and explanatory style in the Chinese cultural context and in the Western context. This finding has practical implications for generalizing the PWB of tourism practitioners in different cultural backgrounds, especially in countries with Eastern cultural backgrounds, further improving the sustainable development of tourism destinations

Tourists' attitudes toward religious commercialization

Commercial activities exist at different religious sites and the practices arouse global concern. This study identifies and assesses religious commercial activities and explores how they affect tourists' attitudes. The well-known Four Great Buddhist Mountains in China were selected as research sites. Using grounded theory, this study initially conducted 80 detailed interviews to build an understanding of commercialization and then investigated 438 travel blogs. The resulting seven commercial categories were: entrance ticket, food and drinks, accommodation, transportation, shopping, staff service, and entertainment. In addition, the level of different commercial categories for all research sites were assessed. The findings showed that tourists had more negative comments about food and drinks, accommodation, and staff service, with less criticism of transportation and entertainment. It implied that tourists were more likely to feel annoyed when tourism products have ambiguous or exaggerated prices and there is a lack of uniform service standards. The research findings offer insights for sustainable development of religious tourism aiming to benefit both local communities and tourists