Unravelling residents' emotion-based attitudes before and after resettlement: A longitudinal investigation.

Residents' attitudes and behaviors exert increasingly essential roles in the success of wholesale urban redevelopment and the resultant resettlement. While previous literature has extensively investigated the predominant impact of residents' cognitive reactions on their attitudes towards resettlement, with a focus on pre- or post-resettlement phase, emotional experience, as an indispensable driving factor, has been largely disregarded. This study expands on existing research by offering a deep understanding of residents' emotion-based attitudes, drawing on insights from environmental psychology and human needs theory. Using individual-level data from a nationwide questionnaire survey in urbanizing China, the statistical results prove that owing to differing situational factors before and after resettlement, two discrete emotions (i.e., worry and satisfaction) are invoked and shape residents' attitudes in opposite directions. Furthermore, the emotions manifest across six specific dimensions related to resettlement. The ordered probit regression results reveal a fine-grained relationship between dimension-specific emotions and attitudes. Community attachment and housing and facility conditions emerge as significant determinants of attitudes in two phases respectively, whereas government behavior holds a long-lasting impact. These insights offer valuable recommendations for policymakers to govern residents' emotions and garner their support throughout the resettlement process. • The causal linkages between residents' emotions and attitudes offer a marked diverge from prior cognition-based research. • An emotional transition from worry to satisfaction accompanies the shift from uncertainty to certainty in resettlement. • Of the six emotional dimensions, government behavior continuously influences residents' attitudes during resettlement. • Community attachment contributes the most before resettlement, whereas the focus turns to material aspects afterward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]