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The purpose of this paper is to explore recent trends in the theories and methods applied to studies on residents’ attitudes.

To achieve the objective of this research, this paper provides a review of 90 journal articles on residents’ attitudes towards tourism published between 2011 and 2017. The relevant articles were then analysed using content analysis.

Key findings revealed that although social exchange theory is still dominant in exploring residents’ attitudes towards tourism, new frameworks are beginning to emerge such as institutional theory and bottom-up spillover theory. Nonetheless, alternative theoretical perspective has only been applied once or twice and requires further engagement. Quantitative methods still dominate the field, with the geographic dispersal of studies spanning 33 countries.

A potential limitation of this review is that articles published only in four leading tourism journals, namely, ATR, JTR, TM and JOST, were analysed.

This review contributes to the literature in tourism by assessing the shift in the application of theory and methodological approaches in residents’ attitudes studies from previous systematic reviews. This study adds to the body of knowledge by providing an overview of the existing status of research on residents’ attitudes towards tourism, providing direction for future scholarly inquiry. A further contribution of this review is an indication of not only the data collection methods but also data analysis techniques which have not been done in previous review articles on residents’ attitudes towards tourism. As opposed to other systematic reviews, this paper assessed the geographical setting of studies on residents’ attitudes towards tourism.

This review aims to discuss concepts and theories from cognitive psychology, identifies tourism studies applying them and discusses key areas for future research. The paper aims to demonstrate the usefulness of cognitive psychology for understanding why tourists and particularly pleasure travellers demonstrate the behaviour they exhibit.

The paper reviews 165 papers from the cognitive psychology and literature regarding pleasure travel related to consciousness, mindfulness, flow, retrospection, prospection, attention, schema and memory, feelings and emotions. The papers are chosen to demonstrate the state of the art of the literature and provide guidance on how these concepts are vital for further research.

The paper demonstrates that research has favoured a behaviourist rather than cognitive approach to the study of hedonic travel. Cognitive psychology can help to understand the mental processes connecting perception of stimuli with behaviour. Numerous examples are provided: top-down and bottom-up attention processes help to understand advertising effectiveness, theories of consciousness and memory processes help to distinguish between lived and recalled experience, cognitive appraisal theory predicts the emotion elicited based on a small number of appraisal dimensions such as surprise and goals, knowledge of the mental organisation of autobiographical memory and schema support understanding of destination image formation and change and the effect of storytelling on decision-making, reconstructive bias in prospection or retrospection about a holiday inform the study of pleasurable experience. These findings indicate need for further cognitive psychology research in tourism generally and studies of holiday travel experiences.

This review is limited to cognitive psychology and excludes psychoanalytic studies.

Cognitive psychology provides insight into key areas of practical importance. In general, the use of a cognitive approach allows further understanding of leisure tourists’ behaviour. The concept of attention is vital to understand destination advertising effectiveness, biases in memory process help to understand visitor satisfaction and experience design and so on. Use of cognitive psychology theory will lead to better practical outcomes for tourists seeking pleasurable experiences and destination managers.

This is the first review that examines the application of concepts from cognitive psychology to the study of leisure tourism in particular. The concepts studied are also applicable to study of travellers generally.

Effective experience design requires not only a knowledge of tourist goals, but an understanding of how these can be met in a particular tourism site. Research on experiences and experience design is supported by cognitive psychology concepts such as perception, attention, appraisal, emotion, consciousness, feelings and memory. However, these concepts are often used in a combination with others from sociology, social or environmental psychology in a manner that leads to confusion rather than clarity, without apparent understanding of the theoretical mechanisms by which these concepts are related. This chapter develops a series of propositions for potential application to tourism experience design. Future research should examine the efficacy of these propositions from cognitive psychology for tourism experience design.