Psychological Mechanisms of Tourist with Depression in Public Opinion Polarization: A Big Data Analysis of Tourism Hotspot Events
Lei ZhongAbstract
Objective
Tourism public opinion polarization aggravates negative emotional impacts on depressed tourists, exacerbating their emotional imbalance and damaging long-term mental health. This study explores the internal correlation between polarized online tourism public sentiment and the conformist psychology of tourists suffering from depression, aiming to uncover how extreme public emotion disturbs depressive individuals’ psychological cognition, identify risks threatening their mental health, and clarify the complete psychological mechanism behind their behavioral deviations.
Subjects and Methods
Mixed research methods were adopted. We gathered 1.2 million social media texts of 15 tourism hot events from 2020 to 2023, adopting sentiment analysis and semantic network analysis to quantify opinion polarization levels. A total of 2,500 tourists including depressive respondents completed questionnaires measuring conformity psychology and mental health status. Correlation and regression models were constructed to analyze how polarized public emotion interferes with depressed tourists’ inner psychological states.
Results
Tourism public opinion presents obvious emotional polarization (polarization index=0.68, p<0.01). Opinion polarization is strongly positively correlated with tourists’ conformist behaviors (r=0.72, p<0.001), and highly polarized events raise tourist conformity by 45%. Group pressure acts as a critical mediator (β=0.64, p<0.01), and polarized negative sentiment amplifies depressive tourists’ emotional fragility, deepens their psychological confusion, and creates severe adverse impacts on their mental health stability.
Conclusions
Tourism public opinion polarization impairs depressed tourists’ mental health via the mediating effect of group pressure and distorts their individual psychological judgment. This research highlights the necessity of targeted mental health intervention for depressive tourist groups. Real-time monitoring of extreme online sentiment can reduce psychological damage to vulnerable people with depression, stabilize public mental health, and offer theoretical references for tourism psychological risk prevention and emotional guidance for psychologically vulnerable tourist populations.
Acknowledgement
Intelligent Governance of Online Public Opinion in the Context of Big Data: Community Construction, Collaborative Evolution, and Guidance Mechanisms (72164034); Research on the Integration and Digital Development of Xinjiang's Cultural and Tourism Industry (20240017).
Corresponding Author
Lei Zhong, Xinjiang University of Finance and Economics, Urumqi, 830012, China.