The study is grounded in the Cognition–Affect–Behavior framework, a classic model in environmental psychology that describes how people first perceive and interpret their surroundings, then experience emotional responses to those interpretations, and finally act. Applied to agricultural heritage tourism, the framework suggests that when visitors perceive a village, its landscapes, and its traditions as authentic, that cognitive judgment triggers affective consequences, chiefly an enhanced sense of well-being, which in turn motivates a behavioral outcome: the inclination to share the experience through storytelling. What makes the new research distinctive is that it does not treat authenticity or well-being as single, undifferentiated quantities. Instead, the team decomposed both constructs into measurable dimensions and tested which specific pathways carry statistical weight.

To do this, the researchers surveyed 402 visitors to three celebrated traditional villages in Anhui Province, China: Hongcun, Chengkan, and Xixinan. These settlements are outstanding examples of agricultural heritage tourism, places where centuries-old domestic architecture, working farmland, ritual life, and resident communities coexist and where tourism revenue supports the conservation of a living landscape rather than a frozen museum piece. Hongcun in particular is internationally known, but all three villages share the defining feature that makes them ideal laboratories for this kind of work: heritage is not staged for tourists but continues to function as part of daily village life. Visitors there encounter irrigation systems, ancestral halls, family compounds, and agricultural practices that are simultaneously attractions and lived realities.

The team analyzed the survey data using partial least squares structural equation modeling, or PLS-SEM, a statistical technique well suited to testing complex networks of hypothesized relationships among latent variables, which are constructs that cannot be observed directly and must be inferred from multiple questionnaire items. PLS-SEM allowed the researchers to estimate both the direct effects of perceived authenticity on storytelling tendency and the indirect effects that operate through well-being, while assessing how each dimension of authenticity contributed to the overall model. This dimensional approach is the study’s methodological backbone, and it is what enables the paper’s most interesting and nuanced findings.

First, the results confirm that tourist-perceived authenticity is not a monolith. The analysis identified five distinct components: ecological experience, cultural interaction, heritage reminiscence, personal reflection, and continuity of tradition. Ecological experience captures the visitor’s sense of the authenticity of the agricultural landscape and its natural setting. Cultural interaction reflects genuine engagement with residents and their customs. Heritage reminiscence involves the evocation of memory and nostalgia connected to rural and agrarian pasts. Personal reflection describes the inward turn, in which the authentic setting prompts visitors to contemplate their own identities and lives. Continuity of tradition, finally, is the perception that the practices on display are not performances but ongoing inheritances that persist across generations.

Second, and most importantly, the study demonstrates that both psychological well-being and subjective well-being mediate the relationship between perceived authenticity and storytelling tendency. Psychological well-being, in the tradition established by psychologist Carol Ryff, refers to deeper dimensions of functioning such as purpose in life, personal growth, autonomy, and positive relations with others. Subjective well-being, by contrast, is the more hedonic construct encompassing life satisfaction and the balance of positive over negative emotions. The finding that both forms of well-being carry the effect means that authentic heritage experiences do not merely make people feel pleasant in the moment; they appear to nourish something more durable, a sense that life is meaningful and going well, and it is this enriched state that travelers are moved to communicate to others.

Yet the mediation is not uniform across dimensions, and this is where the study becomes genuinely instructive for anyone concerned with heritage management. Cultural interaction, the dimension involving direct engagement with local people and their ways of life, showed a significant indirect effect on storytelling tendency only through psychological well-being, not through subjective well-being. In other words, meeting real farmers, watching real craftspeople, and conversing with real residents seems to elevate visitors’ sense of meaning and personal flourishing, and it is that elevation, rather than simple momentary pleasure, that drives them to tell stories. This suggests that the social fabric of a heritage village, the presence and openness of its community, is not a backdrop to the tourist experience but a central psychological ingredient in it.

Equally revealing are the pathways that failed. Personal reflection, the inward-looking dimension of authenticity, showed no significant indirect effect on storytelling tendency through either form of well-being. A visitor may stand in an ancient courtyard and be moved to deep introspection, but according to this data, that private contemplation does not reliably translate into the urge to narrate the experience to others. The implication is subtle: the most personally transformative aspects of heritage travel may also be the least communicable, or at least they do not travel through the well-being route that the study measured. For site managers, this cautions against assuming that encouraging solitary contemplative experiences will automatically generate the word-of-mouth advocacy on which heritage destinations increasingly depend.

The practical stakes of these findings are considerable. Agricultural heritage systems, from terraced rice landscapes to ancient irrigation networks, are recognized internationally as living heritage that must be conserved in use, not merely preserved as artifacts. Their survival depends on tourism economies that value them and on communities that see continuing benefit in maintaining traditional practices. If storytelling by satisfied visitors is a key channel through which heritage destinations build reputation and attract future support, then understanding what makes visitors into storytellers becomes a conservation strategy in its own right. The study suggests that managers should invest in the dimensions of authenticity that feed well-being, particularly opportunities for genuine cultural interaction with residents, and should treat community engagement not as an amenity but as infrastructure for both visitor psychology and heritage communication.

The research also contributes to a broader scientific conversation about why humans tell stories at all. Storytelling has long been understood as a fundamentally social behavior, a way of bonding, teaching, and transmitting culture, and a growing literature links narrative sharing to emotional arousal and self-relevant meaning. This study extends that literature into the heritage context, showing that the stories tourists tell are not simple advertisements for a destination but emotional byproducts of experiences that made them feel that life is richer and more meaningful. In that sense, every tale a traveler tells about a village like Hongcun is also a small act of heritage transmission, carrying the values of a living agricultural tradition into new audiences. The authors argue that their findings provide a theoretical basis for conserving living heritage and communicating heritage values in traditional villages, and the evidence they present makes a compelling case that the future of these landscapes may depend as much on the well-being of the people who walk through them as on the stones and fields themselves.

Subject of Research: The mediating role of tourist well-being in linking perceived authenticity to storytelling tendency in agricultural heritage tourism

Article Title: From tourist-perceived authenticity to storytelling tendency: the mediating role of well-being in agricultural heritage tourism

Article References: Hu, D., Guo, Y., Lu, Y., Song, Y., Shen, G., Xu, X., & Li, L. (2026). From tourist-perceived authenticity to storytelling tendency: the mediating role of well-being in agricultural heritage tourism. npj Heritage Science. https://doi.org/10.1038/s40494-026-03048-8

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1038/s40494-026-03048-8

Keywords: agricultural heritage tourism, perceived authenticity, well-being, storytelling tendency, PLS-SEM, Hongcun, Chengkan, Xixinan, traditional villages, heritage conservation, Cognition-Affect-Behavior framework, cultural interaction

The research, led by Tuyen Kim Thi Dinh and Minh Pham of Ho Chi Minh City Open University together with colleagues from the university’s School of Advanced Study, set out to fill a persistent gap in the literature. Previous studies of livestream commerce had examined individual factors that drive purchase intention, but they paid limited attention to the integrated psychological process by which cognitive evaluations transform into emotional responses and, ultimately, behavioral intentions. To capture that process, the team turned to a classic theoretical structure from environmental and consumer psychology: the Cognition-Affect-Behavior framework, often abbreviated as CAB.

The CAB framework rests on a deceptively simple idea. When people encounter an environment, whether a physical store or a digital space, they first form cognitive appraisals of it, then generate affective or emotional reactions, and finally produce behavioral responses such as approaching, staying, or buying. Applied to livestream commerce, the cognitive layer includes how useful viewers perceive the platform to be, how easy they find it to use, and how strongly they feel transported into the scene, a sensation researchers call perceived telepresence. The affective layer is captured by perceived enjoyment, the pleasure viewers derive simply from watching. The behavioral layer is purchase intention, the self-reported likelihood of buying through the livestream.

To test this model, the researchers surveyed 489 Vietnamese consumers who had watched livestreams and intended to purchase through them. The sample skewed female, was concentrated in Southern Vietnam, and was highly educated, a demographic profile that mirrors the core audience of livestream selling platforms in the region. The team then applied structural equation modeling, a statistical technique that allows researchers to test networks of hypothesized relationships simultaneously, estimating both direct paths between variables and indirect pathways that run through mediating constructs. This approach is particularly well suited to frameworks like CAB, where the theoretical interest lies not just in whether individual factors matter but in how they chain together.

The results were striking in their clarity. Three factors emerged as direct, statistically significant drivers of purchase intention: perceived telepresence, perceived enjoyment, and perceived ease of use. In other words, viewers who felt present in the livestream environment, who found the experience fun, and who found the technology effortless were all more likely to say they would buy. Telepresence deserves particular emphasis. In a livestream, the sensation of being there, watching a host demonstrate a product, answer questions, and respond to comments in real time, appears to do psychological work that static product pages cannot replicate. The study’s authors argue that their findings clarify the role of perceived telepresence in this context, positioning it as a central cognitive ingredient of the livestream experience rather than a peripheral novelty.

Perceived usefulness told a subtler story. It did not exert a direct, statistically meaningful effect on purchase intention on its own. Instead, its influence ran through enjoyment: viewers who found the livestream useful became more engaged and entertained, and that heightened enjoyment in turn lifted their intention to buy. This mediated pathway is a technically important finding because it suggests that usefulness in livestream commerce is not consumed coldly, as a rational calculation of value, but is converted into emotional currency before it shapes behavior. A host who provides genuinely informative product demonstrations does not merely inform the audience; the information makes the show more enjoyable, and the enjoyment sells the product.

Perhaps the most intriguing result concerned expectation confirmation, the degree to which the experience matches what viewers anticipated. Rather than acting as a direct driver, expectation confirmation operated as a moderator, specifically of the relationship between perceived ease of use and purchase intention. In practical terms, this means that the payoff of a smooth, frictionless viewing experience depends on whether the livestream lives up to expectations. When expectations are confirmed, ease of use translates more powerfully into purchase intention; when they are not, even a technically seamless experience may fail to convert viewers into buyers. This moderating role had not been clearly established in prior livestream research, and the authors highlight it as a key contribution of the study.

Methodologically, the research was conducted with careful attention to ethical standards. The study was approved by the Institutional Review Board of Ho Chi Minh City Open University, with approval number 1644/QD-DHM issued on August 4, 2025, and all participants were informed about the purpose and procedures of the study and provided informed consent before taking part. The authors declare no competing interests, and the article is published open access under a Creative Commons license, making the full technical detail of the model available to researchers and practitioners worldwide.

The theoretical significance of the work lies in its extension of the CAB framework into livestream commerce, a domain the framework had rarely been applied to in integrated form. By demonstrating that cognitive appraisals feed emotional responses which then drive behavioral intentions, and by specifying where moderators like expectation confirmation intervene, the study offers a coherent psychological architecture for understanding digital consumer decision-making. It also situates that architecture in an emerging market context, where livestream commerce is growing rapidly and where most existing theory, built largely on Western e-commerce data, has been untested. The Vietnamese sample, dominated by young, educated, female consumers in the country’s south, provides a valuable data point for a global literature that has often overlooked such markets.

The practical implications are equally concrete. For platform designers, the primacy of telepresence and enjoyment suggests that investment should flow toward features that deepen immersion and delight, such as high-quality video, interactive overlays, responsive comment systems, and charismatic host training, rather than toward interface complexity. For sellers and hosts, the mediated role of usefulness implies that informative content is not optional; it is the raw material from which enjoyment is built. And for marketers, the moderating effect of expectation confirmation delivers a cautionary lesson: overpromising in promotional material can backfire, because unmet expectations blunt the conversion power of an otherwise effortless experience. As livestream commerce expands across emerging online markets, the study suggests that the platforms that thrive will be those that understand a simple psychological truth, that people do not buy from streams they merely watch, but from streams that make them feel present, capable, and genuinely entertained.

Subject of Research: Consumer psychology of purchase intention in livestream commerce using the Cognition-Affect-Behavior framework

Article Title: Understanding purchase intention in livestream commerce through the Cognition-Affect-Behavior framework

Article References: Dinh, T. K. T., Doan, B. T. T., Tran, T. B. N., Vo, L. T. N., Pham, D. N., Dinh, T. M. N., & Pham, M. (2026). Understanding purchase intention in livestream commerce through the Cognition-Affect-Behavior framework. Discover Psychology. https://doi.org/10.1007/s44202-026-00911-4

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.1007/s44202-026-00911-4

Keywords: livestream commerce, purchase intention, Cognition-Affect-Behavior framework, perceived telepresence, perceived enjoyment, perceived ease of use, expectation confirmation, structural equation modeling, consumer behavior, Vietnam, emerging markets, cyberpsychology