Theme park reviews: how text mining cognitive characteristics and emotions can determine theme park image

Graphical abstract Purpose The theme park industry has attracted wide attention and visitors’ perceptions are key to improving theme park management. Applying the cognitive-affective theory, this study aims to explore various cognitive attributes and affective attitudes and how they affect the overall theme park image. Design/methodology/approach A mixed research method was used to analyze tourists’ cognitive, affective and overall evaluations of theme parks through text mining and logistic regression and to verify their internal relationships. Findings Study 1 confirms the impact of six features of theme parks, including food and beverage consumption, merchandising, spatiality, immersive technologies, interactive performances and thematization. Study 2 reveals that finer-grained emotions such as goodness, sadness, disgust, surprise, fear, joy and anger are present in visitor reviews. Study 3 confirms the significant influence of cognitive characteristics and emotions related to theme parks on the overall image through regression analysis. The findings carry meaningful implications for theme park managers, offering guidance on customer needs, perceived negative attributes and how to improve visitor experiences. Originality/value This study explores the attribute characteristics of cognitive and affective images of theme parks and their influence on the overall image, thereby enriching the research on the connotations of cognitive-affective theory. In particular, this study introduces and quantitatively analyses the concept of theme parks for the first time through a large-scale data analysis, which empirically reconciles the contradictions of previous reviews of different definitions of theme parks.