The PAD Emotional State Scale is the foundational three-dimensional model of emotional experience in environmental psychology and the most widely applied emotional state measure in consumer and retail behaviour research. Mehrabian and Russell (1974) proposed that emotional responses to environments — and by extension to products, brands, and marketing stimuli — can be fully described along three orthogonal dimensions: Pleasure (feeling good, joyful, satisfied), Arousal (feeling stimulated, alert, excited), and Dominance (feeling in control, dominant, able to act freely). The PAD framework generated the highly influential S-O-R model in retail atmospherics (Donovan & Rossiter, 1982). PAD dimensions mediate the effects of store design, background music, scent, lighting, and colour on approach/avoidance behaviour, time spent in-store, and purchase amount.
Mehrabian, A., & Russell, J.A. (1974). An approach to environmental psychology. MIT Press.
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