Tourist experiences are shaped by destination appraisals—here understood as place identification, perceived cultural heterogeneity, and perceived ecological authenticity—that supply meaning and relevance to the environment (MacCannell, 1973; Montello, 1993; Hughes, 1995; Gustafson, 2001; Kianicka et al., 2006; Lewicka, 2011b; Li, 2014). Consistent with an appraisal-based view of emotion, these appraisals recruit discrete emotional functions rather than a monolithic affect: awe, a self-transcendent response to perceived vastness and symbolic elevation, and restorative experience, characterized by attentional replenishment and reduced cognitive load in nature (Kaplan, 1995; Keltner and Haidt, 2003).

Framed by the Stimulus–Organism–Response (S–O–R) perspective, destination appraisals (S) elicit awe and restorative experience as organismic states (O), which in turn shape the response (word-of-mouth intention) conceived as a prosocial communication intention to share and recommend one’s experience (Hosany et al., 2017; Wang et al., 2020). The model is anchored in cognitive appraisal theory and attention-restoration accounts, with broaden-and-build providing the motivational bridge from positive emotion to outward social action (Lazarus, 1991; Kaplan, 1995; Fredrickson, 2001).

However, recent research in tourism and hospitality utilizing S–O–R framework has frequently characterized the organismic component through broad affective measures, including general arousal or overall positive affect (Su et al., 2020; Hosany et al., 2021). This approach makes it difficult to distinguish among functionally heterogeneous positive states. The research on awe and restorative experience is substantial, but it has evolved along divergent paths. Studies in nature- and mountain-based tourism define awe as a self-transcendent feeling triggered by perceived immensity and transcendence, while examining its potential behavioral consequences (Keltner and Haidt, 2003; Pearce et al., 2017; Tsaur et al., 2024). The environmental-psychology tradition, conversely, emphasizes restorative experience, highlighting attentional replenishment and psychological recovery in environments marked by coherence and gentle attraction (Kaplan and Kaplan, 1989; Kaplan, 1995). Current tourism research has rarely incorporated these two affective mechanisms into a cohesive theoretical framework and has paid less consideration to their potential temporal sequencing, such as whether awe may act as a precursor to restorative experience. This study introduces a “dual-pathway” cascade model to address the identified limitation: distinct types of perceptual signals are associated with awe and restorative experience, respectively; awe subsequently enhances restorative experience; and collectively, these processes influence tourists’ intention to engage in word-of-mouth communication.

Place identification (PI) captures the cognitive recognition of spatial and symbolic markers—iconic scenery, sacred sites, landmarks, and culturally resonant place names—that stabilizes spatial awareness and lends meaning to later emotional responses (Montello, 1993; Gustafson, 2001; Lewicka, 2011b). From an appraisal perspective (Lazarus, 1991), recognising culturally or geographically distinctive features, for example Five-Color Lake and Chonggu Temple, heightens appraisals of extraordinariness, vastness, and symbolic elevation and thereby elicits awe, a self-transcendent emotion aligned with the landscape-sublime tradition (Keltner and Haidt, 2003; Arcangeli et al., 2020; Rivera et al., 2020). High-altitude sacred settings often combine perceived magnitude with moral–spiritual significance, which amplifies the aesthetic and existential tones of awe (Setten and Brown, 2009; Ferriolo, 2019). Accordingly, the following hypothesis is proposed:

Perceived cultural heterogeneity (PC) captures visitors’ readings of ethnic plurality, ritual practice, vernacular aesthetics, and customary lifeways at a destination (Sánchez-Rivero and Pulido-Fernández, 2012; Mazanec et al., 2015). In attention–restoration accounts, culturally coherent diversity affords soft fascination: it holds attention with little effort and thickens the meaning of place (Kaplan and Kaplan, 1989; Li, 2014; Mazanec et al., 2015). In high-altitude ecocultural settings, layered narrative cues—prayer rituals, vernacular architecture, seasonal performances—give visitors interpretive handles for engagement and symbolic reappraisal, which supports attentional recovery and affective renewal (Hernández-Mogollón et al., 2018; Yang et al., 2022). Cultural restoration thus emerges from meaning-making and patterned diversity in humanized environments and sits alongside biophysical routes. Accordingly, higher cultural heterogeneity should relate to stronger restorative experience.

Perceived ecological authenticity (PE) refers to appraisals of a destination as ecologically intact—pristine, biodiverse, and minimally affected by human intervention—thereby evoking judgments of natural purity and an elemental return to nature (Cohen, 1988; Hughes, 1995; Kianicka et al., 2006). In high-altitude ecocultural contexts, such appraisals signal environmental integrity and enable meaning-laden contact with “unspoiled” landscapes. In line with Attention Restoration Theory, environments with low anthropogenic intrusion and high biophysical coherence and richness are understood to elicit soft fascination, lighten cognitive load, and promote attentional renewal and affective recovery (Kaplan, 1995). In high-altitude ecocultural contexts, conditions of clean air, quiet soundscapes, and wide, undisturbed vistas accord with the mechanism and are associated with greater restorative experience (Zhang et al., 2023; Cheng et al., 2025). On this basis, the following hypothesis is advanced:

Awe (AW) characterized as a self-transcendent reaction to perceived vastness and symbolic elevation, serves as the essential link between evaluation and behavior (Keltner and Haidt, 2003). In high-altitude ecocultural environments, the acknowledgment of culturally significant landmarks, sacred geographies, and monumental landscapes enhances perceptions of extraordinariness; consequently, place identification (PI), by emphasizing iconic spatial and symbolic indicators (e.g., Five-Color Lake, Chonggu Temple), intensifies feelings of awe (Setten and Brown, 2009; Ferriolo, 2019).

Beyond its immediate affective impact, awe broadens attention and readiness to “accommodate” experience, laying cognitive–affective groundwork for restorative experience (RE) through soft fascination and reduced cognitive load (Kaplan, 1995; Chirico and Yaden, 2018). Simultaneously, the elevating and memorable nature of awe fosters prosocial communication—a readiness to validate, share, and recommend one’s experience—thereby increasing word-of-mouth intention in both in-person and digital contexts (Van Cappellen and Saroglou, 2012; Xu and Hu, 2024).

Thus, the subsequent hypotheses are posited:

Restorative experience (RE) denotes an affective condition of mental recovery, emotional replenishment, and effortless immersion arising in environments that afford soft fascination and psychological detachment (Kaplan, 1995). In line with the broaden-and-build account of positive emotion (Fredrickson, 2001), Restorative experience not only alleviates cognitive fatigue but also promotes prosocial communication—including a readiness to recommend and share experiences as word-of-mouth intention (Wang et al., 2020; Chua et al., 2025).

Two appraisal-based antecedents are anticipated to provoke restorative experience. Perceived cultural heterogeneity—the sensed richness and distinctiveness of ethnic symbols, rituals, vernacular aesthetics, and customary practices—invites meaning-laden engagement and gentle attentional capture, even in unfamiliar settings, thereby supporting attentional replenishment and affective renewal (Hernández-Mogollón et al., 2018; Seyfi et al., 2020). Perceived ecological authenticity—assessments of environmental cleanliness, minimal human interference, and biodiversity—has been associated with psychological restoration; experiences of clean air, tranquil soundscapes, flowing water, and vast alpine vistas diminish cognitive load and promote restorative experience (Tang et al., 2024a; Zhang et al., 2024).

Based on these mechanisms and the study’s sequential perspective, the following hypotheses are proposed:

In sum, the hypothesized effects compose a sequential appraisal–emotion process culminating in word-of-mouth intention. The resulting conceptual model is shown in Figure 1.

A total of 439 valid responses were analyzed (Table 3). The gender proportion was 53.30% male and 46.70% female. Most of the respondents were younger than 50 years old; the largest age groups were 18–30 years (32.57%) and 31–40 years (30.07%). Most of them were well educated (68.14% undergraduate and postgraduate degree). The monthly income was heterogeneous, including 33.26% for CNY 5,001–8,000 and 5.69% with more than CNY 10, 000.

To examine the potential impact of common method bias, both variance-based and factor-based diagnostics were utilized. The variance inflation factors (VIFs) of all indicators’ outcomes fell in the range from 1.459 to 2.847, which is within the typical acceptable range of at least 3.3 often recommended for PLS-SEM models (Kock, 2015). In other words, there is no detectable collinearity or method bias. Also, Harman’s single-factor test was performed on the data in SPSS through the unrotated principal component analysis procedure. The first extracted factor accounted for 30.25% of the variance in total, falling short of the established 50% cutoff for factor’s variance (Podsakoff et al., 2003). Overall, this test suggests that common method variance is unlikely to constitute a large threat to validity of the results.

This study integrates large-scale semantic analysis of tourist narratives with text-derived measurement development and theory-guided PLS-SEM to clarify how ecocultural appraisals translate into word-of-mouth intention in high-altitude destinations. Three appraisal-like perceptions—place identification, perceived cultural heterogeneity, and perceived ecological authenticity—were associated with two functionally distinct positive states: awe and restorative experience. The findings support a dual-pathway architecture: place identification primarily elicits awe, whereas cultural heterogeneity and ecological authenticity primarily foster restorative experience. In addition, awe precedes and strengthens restorative experience, producing a sequential affective cascade that further promotes recommendation intentions. Theoretically, these findings enhance S–O–R models by defining the organismic stage as distinct and potentially ordered affective processes instead of a singular, undifferentiated positive affect. Practically, the dual-pathway pattern suggests that sustainable management can be enhanced by experiential designs that integrate symbolic place cues to evoke awe with ecocultural coherence and environmental quality to facilitate restoration, potentially augmenting visitors’ WOM intention.

Semantic analysis identified three perceptual dimensions—place identification, cultural heterogeneity, and ecological authenticity—as well as two functionally distinct affective states, awe and restorative experience, thereby addressing RQ1. These constructs are embedded in a high-altitude ecocultural setting where spiritual geography, ethnocultural diversity, and ecological fragility intersect, and they appear to be expressed and emphasized in ways that differ from more conventional tourism contexts. First, prior work commonly treats place identification as an affective attachment to landscape symbols (Williams and Vaske, 2003; Lewicka, 2011a; Zou et al., 2023). In sacred high-altitude environments, however, place meaning is more strongly reflected in visitors’ engagement with a transcendent symbolic order (e.g., meaning systems carried by sacred mountains), extending symbolic attachment from emotional identification toward an embodied form of spiritual practice. Second, although cultural heterogeneity and ecological authenticity are often discussed separately (Stylidis, 2016; Park et al., 2019), they tend to merge in this context into a perception of “ecocultural integrity,” whereby local rituals, vernacular architecture, and pristine alpine ecosystems are experienced as an inseparable whole. This integrative perception helps explain why the two dimensions jointly relate to restorative experience and also suggests that cultural coherence may function as a restorative resource, complementing attention restoration theory’s emphasis on naturalness (Kaplan, 1995). Finally, emotion research links awe to experiential cues of vastness and sacredness (Keltner and Haidt, 2003; Piff et al., 2015; Zhang and He, 2025), whereas restorative experience is typically associated with tranquil immersion, environmental coherence, and attentional recovery processes (Kaplan, 1995; Jeong, 2024; Tang et al., 2024b). Taken together, the present findings provide a context-sensitive delineation of the semantic profiles of awe and restorative experience in high-altitude ecocultural tourism, strengthening the contextual fit of these emotion constructs.

Distinct perceptual cues corresponded to relatively independent affective routes, thereby addressing RQ2. The results indicate that the association between place identification and awe is more pronounced, whereas cultural heterogeneity and ecological authenticity are more strongly linked to restorative experience, suggesting two separable yet co-occurring emotional pathways. Prior studies note that awe is often connected to experience cues related to sacredness and grandeur (Keltner and Haidt, 2003; Piff et al., 2015), and that immersion in natural environments and perceived environmental coherence can facilitate psychological restoration (Kaplan, 1995; Tang et al., 2024b). Yet in tourism research these responses have frequently been examined in isolation or implicitly folded into a single positive-affect dimension in empirical models. In contrast, the present study suggests that a single high-altitude destination encounter may involve two functionally different positive states: awe tends to align with symbolic sublimity and sacred cues, while restorative experience aligns more closely with tranquil immersion and culturally–ecologically coherent settings. This pattern is consistent with the view that emotions can be differentiated by function rather than valence (Chirico and Yaden, 2018; Lucht and Van Schie, 2024). The co-occurrence of these pathways further implies that high-altitude destinations may simultaneously elicit complementary positive emotions, offering a more fine-grained lens for understanding the multiplicity of affective experience in tourism contexts.

RQ3 can be clarified through the mediational patterns. The results show that the effect of place identification on word-of-mouth intention is primarily transmitted through awe, whereas the effects of cultural heterogeneity and ecological authenticity operate mainly through restorative experience (Kaplan and Kaplan, 1989; Hosany and Gilbert, 2010; Prayag et al., 2017). In addition, the model reveals a directional path from awe to restorative experience, such that awe not only carries its own indirect effect but may also contribute to a cascaded mediation by strengthening restoration, thereby increasing the overall mediated influence. This pattern accords with broaden-and-build reasoning, whereby self-transcendent emotions may broaden cognitive–affective resources and create more favorable conditions for subsequent recovery (Fredrickson, 2001; Shiota et al., 2007). Compared with approaches that treat positive affect as a unitary mediator, the present results more clearly specify how different perceptual cues are channeled through distinct emotional functions to shape word-of-mouth intention in high-altitude tourism. They also suggest that awe may serve as a precursor state that participates in the formation of advocacy-oriented responses via restorative experience. In this sense, an “awe–restoration” cascade may provide a supplementary interpretive framework for understanding the dynamic affective pathways of complex tourism experiences.

Previous applications of the stimulus–organism–response (S–O–R) framework in tourism and hospitality have frequently operationalized the organismic component via broad affective indices such as general arousal or PAD-based dimensions, which risk conflating functionally distinct positive emotions (Su et al., 2020; Hosany et al., 2021). Conversely, recent studies in nature-based and mountain tourism are starting to regard awe as a distinct self-transcendent emotion with particular antecedents and behavioral outcomes (Pearce et al., 2017; Tsaur et al., 2024). This study enhances the S–O–R model by illustrating that the organismic phase in ecocultural destinations is not a singular affective state but a structured system of dual pathways: place identification predominantly elicits awe, whereas perceived cultural heterogeneity and ecological authenticity collaboratively promote restorative experience. These pathways are not autonomous; awe precedes and enhances restoration, demonstrating a sequential affective cascade that surpasses the notion of uniform positive arousal. This dynamic architecture provides a more detailed and theoretically sound description of the S–O–R mechanism in high-altitude settings where symbolic sublimity and ecocultural coherence together influence advocacy intentions.

The research enhances the S–O–R model of tourism behavior through its analysis of how tourists convert their ecocultural appraisals into tourists’ word-of-mouth intentions. First, whereas prior research often operationalizes the organism component as a general positive affective state (Mehrabian and Russell, 1974; Su et al., 2020; Hosany et al., 2021), this finding indicate that organismic responses can be differentiated into two functionally distinct states, forming a dual-pathway structure. Place identification is more closely associated with awe, whereas perceived cultural heterogeneity and perceived ecological authenticity are more closely associated with restorative experience (Kaplan, 1995; Keltner and Haidt, 2003). Second, the results further suggest that awe tends to precede restorative experience. This implies that within a single tourism encounter, appraisal-evoked self-transcendent emotion may occur earlier and connect to subsequent attention-recovery processes (Kaplan, 1995; Fredrickson, 2001; Shiota et al., 2007). Overall, these patterns indicate that different appraisal dimensions may influence word-of-mouth intention through differentiated—and potentially temporally ordered—affective processes, offering a more fine-grained characterization of the organismic stage in S–O–R models.

Drawing on evidence from ten high-altitude ecocultural destinations on the Northwestern Sichuan Plateau, three management priorities emerge within a dual-emotion S–O–R framework. First, branding and on-site interpretation should consistently cue the three perceptual dimensions—place identification, cultural heterogeneity, and ecological authenticity. At Jiuzhaigou and Daocheng, for example, symbolic framing strengthens identity and recognition, while Tibetan vernacular elements and alpine purity signal heterogeneity and authenticity. Second, experience design should deliberately elicit awe and restoration through elevated viewpoints, ritual/communal spaces, and quiet sanctuary zones that broaden attention and support affective recovery. Third, restorative settings should ensure spatial coherence, credible authenticity cues, and multisensory consonance, given the observed association between restorative experience and word-of-mouth intention. Although derived from the plateau context, these principles are transferable to other high-mountain ecocultural regions (e.g., the Himalayas, Andes, Carpathians).

This study has several limitations. First, because the data are cross-sectional, temporal ordering and causal effects among appraisals, emotions, and behavioral intentions cannot be established. Therefore, the proposed sequence in which awe precedes restoration should be interpreted cautiously and verified in future research using longitudinal designs (e.g., experience sampling) or experiments (e.g., priming cultural symbols and ecological cues via controlled imagery or VR). Second, the current S–O–R specification is largely unidirectional and does not test possible feedback processes (e.g., whether restorative experience strengthens place identification). It also foregrounds positive affect while leaving negative or mixed emotions that may arise in ecologically fragile or culturally sensitive settings (e.g., eco-anxiety or cultural alienation) outside the model; cross-lagged and mixed-emotion perspectives may help capture these dynamics. Third, the perceptual dimensions were derived from a high-altitude ethnocultural context in which natural scenery, cultural practices, and spiritual symbolism are often co-articulated, which may limit transferability to lowland, urban, or less symbolically salient destinations; cross-context replications are needed to assess external validity. Finally, the study did not examine cultural and individual boundary conditions. Interpretations of “ecological authenticity” and “awe” may vary across cultural meaning systems (e.g., East Asian versus Western emphases), and individual traits such as ecological values, prior high-altitude travel experience, and spirituality may condition appraisal–emotion links. Future studies could test these moderators using multi-cultural comparisons, multi-group analyses, or moderation (including moderated-mediation) models.