Stimulating tourists’ psychological restoration and subjective vitality via religious tourism: combining stimulus-organism-response model and attention restoration theory

This study aims to create a religious tourism experiencescape scale and examine whether the environment fosters tourists’ mental health. Employing text analysis and two questionnaire surveys from Chinese tourists, structural equation modeling and fuzzy-set qualitative comparative analysis were conducted, revealing that religious tourism experiencescape comprises the four dimensions of nature and architecture, religious ambience, social interaction, and functional factors; perceived restorative quality fully mediates the relationships of experiencescape with mental restoration and subjective vitality; low spirituality exhibits a strong causal relationship with low subjective vitality. The findings provide a clear framework for developing the religious tourism environment and product design.