Abstract:

Owing to the long-term acceptability principle of geography, emotion has always been in a relatively marginal position in the study of geography. With the emotional turn of western geography, the research of human-centered "emotional relationship" has gradually attracted great attention from domestic and foreign scholars. To grasp the research ideas, research methods, research hotspots, research progress, and key scientific issues of research in emotional geography of domestic and foreign scholars, this study used the bibliometric method to sort out, summarize, and condense 265 foreign language documents and 248 Chinese documents with the theme of "emotional geography" from 1992 to 2020. The study discussed the quantitative relationship, temporal and spatial distribution rules, distribution characteristics, and characteristics of emotional geographic literature at home and abroad. Gephi software was used to visually present research cases at home and abroad, and Citespace software was used to analyze the co-occurrence knowledge graph of keywords in the literature and to clear the research hotspots of emotional geography at home and abroad. The connotation and significance of the research have been explained, and the research prospects are put forward. The study concluded that the key scientific issues of emotional geography include five aspects: constructing a theoretical model of emotional geography with Chinese characteristics, establishing a sound system of emotional geography research methods, promoting the integration and interdisciplinary research of emotional geography and other disciplines, exploring the operating mechanism and practice path of emotional geography for stabling emotions, peace of mind, and understanding society, and studying the impact mechanism of human emotional needs on the construction of local space. There were many research topics at home and abroad, and foreign research hotspots mainly focused on politics, education, gender and climate, whereas domestic research focused on sense of place, tourism, and residents. After nearly 30 years of research on emotional geography at home and abroad, it can be divided into three stages: initiation, expansion, and volatility growth. Research methods have also gone through three stages: from qualitative descriptive analysis to the combination of qualitative and quantitative, innovative and diversified quantitative methods, and collaborative qualitative research. Academia has reached a consensus on the three-dimensionality of "person, emotion, place (space)," but only a few scholars have defined the concept of emotional geography. Thus far, cognition has not been unified, hindering the research process of emotional geography. Based on the complex patterns of emotional geography, time-complex processes, and time-space complex features, follow-up research is needed to collaboratively couple with multidisciplinary theories and methods to find a scientific, typical, representative, and practical theoretical system. There is also a need for qualitative and quantitative research methods combining with the analysis of cultural self-confidence, rural revitalization, homesickness, and uniquely Chinese characteristics of "emotional relationship" and other social hot topics, to provide valuable and scientifically based references for follow-up emotional geography research, expand scholars' research horizons, promote the theoretical and systematic research of emotional geography with Chinese characteristics, improve the academic influence and discourse power of emotional geography, and serve mankind better.

Key words: emotional geography, document metrology, visualization, sense of place