Claudio Feliciani

Understanding how visitors respond to crowding is crucial for ensuring the success, safety, and overall enjoyment of large-scale exhibitions. However, despite its significance, limited research has explored this issue. To address this gap, we conducted a questionnaire survey in 2022 and 2023 for visitors to exhibitions held at the Tokyo Big Sight Convention Center. Our research aims to explore the level of consistency between perceived and actual crowding, levels of discomfort in crowded situations, tolerance levels for crowding, and behaviors to avoid crowded situations. The results revealed significant changes in visitor perceptions across the two-year period. Notably, the acceptable crowd density in 2023 increased by 13% compared to 2022. This change in level of tolerance for crowding might have been influenced by the COVID-19 pandemic and other contextual factors that altered visitors’ perceptions toward crowding. Interestingly, despite these perceptual changes, behaviors to avoid crowded situations remained consistent across both years. The most common response was that no special action was taken to avoid crowded situations. These findings underscore that perceptions and behaviors related to crowding in the context of large-scale exhibitions are not uniform. Our findings offer several implications and insights for crowd management, which event organizers can use to devise strategies aimed at enhancing visitors’ experiences and effectively managing crowding in large-scale exhibitions.

This study analyzed behavioral changes in South Korean individuals during the COVID-19 pandemic due to movement restrictions and examined their psychological effects. Attributes considered include age and gender, place of residence, and characteristics of the residential environment and communities they came into contact with, which are considered important factors in individuals’ psychological changes. The results showed that in terms of psychological change, the negative effects were more significant for attributes such as age and gender than for spatial characteristics such as residential area and type of residence. In addition, depression was found in specific gender and age groups. In particular, those in their 20s were found to be more depressed than those in their 30s and 40s, even though they were less prone infection with COVID-19 than older adults. Through the findings of this study, we have discovered materials and factors that should be taken into account when preparing policies to limit the motion of people in circumstances similar to a pandemic.