Do emotional mental models before and after an effective visitation of a virtual world differ?

The aim of the study is to find out the mental model of people concerning the virtual world Second Life. The present study bases the mental model on emotional feelings of people who think of service and product presentations in Second Life. In a first step the emotional mental model of test persons without prior knowledge of Second Life is uncovered. In a second step people effectively visited a hotel’s appearance in the virtual world. After, they were asked again to tell their emotions concerning a service and product presentation in such an environment. Then, the gathered terms were allocated to the basic emotions proposed by Izard (1977) by 25 encoders. Results show, that there are differences between the emotional mental model before and after the visitation of the virtual world. Thus, indicating that expectations are not consistent with the actual experience in SL.