How Does Mazu Festival Affect the Well-being of Elderly Tourists?An Empirical Study from the Perspective of Restorative Experience

Abstract Restorative environment research has predominantly focused on natural settings, with limited attention to short-duration, high-density folk festivals and elderly populations. Drawing upon the stimulus–organism–response (S-O-R) framework, this study integrates attention restoration theory and place attachment theory to construct a serial mediation model of “Perceived Restorative Environment through Place attachment and psychological recovery to Hedonic Well-being.” Using the Mazu Festival on Meizhou Island as the case site, a questionnaire survey was conducted among 552 elderly tourists aged 55 and above, and partial least squares structural equation modeling (PLS-SEM) was employed to test the hypotheses. The results indicate that Perceived Restorative Environment enhances Hedonic Well-being through dual mechanisms—a direct emotional gain pathway and a sequential cognitive–affective pathway via Place attachment and psychological recovery. Legibility exhibits robust explanatory power in the festival context. Short-term festival participation primarily yields attentional recovery, while deep psychological restoration is constrained by limited stay duration. At the theoretical level, this study proposes the “Dual-Pathway Model of Festival Restorative Experience,” extending the applicability of restorative environment theory from natural landscapes to cultural festival settings, and reveals how temporal constraints and cognitive aging shape the restoration pathways, thereby offering a new theoretical framework for understanding elderly well-being generation in culturally intensive tourism contexts. At the practical level, the findings provide concrete pathways for the age-friendly design of folk festival spaces and offer empirical support for transforming folk cultural tourism resources into public mental health intervention tools for the elderly, contributing to the improvement of active aging social service systems.