Global Journal of Human-Social Science, A: Arts and Humanities, Volume 22 Issue 4

The empirical studies by Chandralal & Valenzuela (2013) allow us to collect the following data: the cultural tourist emits a predisposition to engage in experiences that are of personal significance, in this memorable sense, which intellectually stimulate the discovery of self-expression and the promotion of co- social interaction, inevitably resulting in the development of new skills, ultimately offering unprecedented learning opportunities. Here again, emotion plays a key role, as highlighted by the authors Howard & Gengler (2001), according to which the range of emotions experienced by the user decisively influence the evaluation of the experience, and it is those positive emotions that are normally associated with the experience. incorporation of memorable experiences (Tung & Ritchie, 2011). According to Aho (2011), the role of emotion is highlighted in the prism of tourism research. Bengtsson (2002) points out that research largely neglects the importance of the subjective significant construction of experience. In this regard, Filep (2012) recognizes the dialectical gap between the coordinates of pleasure and satisfaction and the coordinates of attribution of new experiences, bringing together the construction of new meanings. This constitutes a challenge for creative tourism in particular and for the emergence of new interactive art/new media products and services that promote the user/cultural tourist in expressive aesthetic actions of involvement and active participation in the co- constructive exploratory design of unprecedented subjective personal narratives, fostering new immersive audiovisual representations, and boosting the power of creativity to imbue the spectator cognitively and affectively in the construction of new aesthetic figurations. The focus of creative tourism should be conceptually based on the psychological benefits that new experiences of a memorable nature bring to the user/cultural tourist (Corvo, 2010). The authors Yuan & Wu (2008) emphasize this same focus in current academic research around the variable of experiencing memorable moments/events. According to Huta & Ryan (2010), research in positive psychology reinforced the importance of experiencing experiences, bringing together the factor of discovering pleasure with the construction of new representations embedded in meaning (aesthetic- creative). This brings us to the foundations of the psychology of hedonism applied to creative tourism, according to which the cultural user/tourist seeks pleasure and satisfaction in relational simultaneity with intellectual discovery. In this light, the aspects of hedonia and eudaimonia merge, contemplating the self- reflexive discovery of new knowledge with the pleasure of emotional experiencing, resulting in the development of the user's/cultural tourist's sense of competence/ "mastery" in absorbing new learning (Huta , 2013). According to Waterman (1993) and regarding the theories of hedonism and eudaimonia, activities that offer “affordances” for the development of users’ personal skills maximize their creative and intellectual potential in immersion and stimulate their power of self- expression, discovery and consequent personal fulfillment. The same author focuses on the new opportunities that can be offered to the user to actively, from an immersive point of view, discover new forms of aesthetic representation, operating simultaneously with the sharing of spiritually enriching social experiences. This points to the emergence of a commitment to develop innovative products and services that enable the immersion of the user/cultural tourist's senses, based on the theoretical framework of "flow", promoting the power of self-expression and self-regulation of the cognitive and affective agency of the experience itself, which necessarily incorporates the discovery and overcoming of challenges in eclectic harmony with the gradual construction of new skills and learning. The author Csikszentmihalyi (1975) linked the concept of “flow” to the development of the sphere of intrinsic motivation of the user, and the incorporation of eudaimonia emotions emerges in the synchronous duality that is established between the offer of challenging discovery goals and the reception of new skills/learning, meeting the user's emotional expectations of expressive self-fulfillment. According to Deci & Ryan (1985), the power of discovering self-expression lies in the gear of user involvement and active participation in incorporating memorable experiences into themselves, elements that contribute to the development of the dialectical sense of intrinsic motivation and flow. Eudaimonia appears associated in the scientific literature that analyzes the motivations for tourism to the perspectives of personal growth (Ryan, 2002), personal enrichment (Prubensen, 2012) and also to the component of self-development (Pearce, 2005). According to Huta & Ryan (2010), the current tourism sector is ineffective in stimulating the cultural tourist's power of creative self-expression, incorporating the dimensions that merge emotional experiencing and the intelligible construction of meanings, thus aiming on the one hand at the construction of an “engineering of positive emotions to create empathic and memorable experiences” (Hosany & Gilbert, 2010) and, on the other hand, to enhance the construction of new meanings brought to the experience of the tourist experience itself (Tussyadiah, 2014). Studies postulate that users can develop an affective connection with places and tourist destinations (Hidalgo & Hernandez, 2011). The authors Williams & Vaske (2003) emphasize that the sense of connection to the place appropriates two basic dimensions: the very dependence of the place (functional connection) and the identity of the place (emotional connection). Place © 2022 Global Journals Volume XXII Issue IV Version I 21 ( ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2022 A 15 Interactive Arts and Creative Tourism