A Meta-Analytical Review of PAD Within Retail Environments: An Abstract

Abstract

The physical store environment is an essential factor that contributes to the overall shopping experience of consumers (Babin and Darden 1995). Specifically, consumer behavioral outcomes are shaped by elements within retail environments that can evoke emotional responses (e.g., Chaudhuri and Ligas 2009; Dawson et al. 1990; Matilla and Wirtz 2001). The classical environment model by Mehrabian and Russell (1974) incorporates a primary emotional response that can be classified as pleasure, arousal, or dominance (PAD). The PAD dimensions are assessed with an 18-item semantic differential scale covering emotional response ranges, including happy-unhappy, stimulated-relaxed, and dominant-submissive responses. Considering the vast application of PAD in the retail literature, the overall goal of this research is to better understand the impact of PAD on atmospheric research. Furthermore, we try to clarify which dimensions are most commonly applied in atmospheric studies and provide insights into which dimension most strongly relates to outcome variables.We utilize a meta-analysis methodology to address the proposed research questions. The scope of the meta-analysis is limited to articles published in the Journal of Retailing. In total, 341 articles were reviewed with the final sample consisting of 15 articles and 33 studies. The total sample size was 3,366 consumers. Results provide evidence that emotions have a significant influence on commonly used outcome measures in retail environment studies. We contribute to the atmospheric literature by confirming stable relationships between pleasure as well as arousal dimensions and a multitude of consumer responses. Thus, PAD remains as a reliable construct in atmospheric research. Overall, the effect size for pleasure is substantially larger across all analyses. However, the effect size for arousal is larger for attitudinal outcome measures, which contradicts previous findings by Donovan and Rossiter (1982). Further research is needed to validate these findings.

The influence of aesthetics and emotions on reuse intention and compulsive behaviour in food delivery usage

“…In the online realm, PAD theory has been successfully used to analyse usage intention of technology interfaces (apps, websites, etc.) in the retail sector (Krey et al ., 2018), in e-commerce websites (Chang et al ., 2014), in luxury fashion websites and apps (Jebarajakirthy et al ., 2020), in the use of social networks, for example, Facebook (Hall et al ., 2017) and, recently, it has proven very useful for explaining the use of FDAs and their recurrent use (Jeon et al ., 2016; Handayani et al ., 2022) or continued log-in behaviours (Shah et al ., 2023).…”

“…The authors identified three basic emotions linked to pleasure, arousal, and dominance as a response to an individual’s evaluation of stimuli in their environment: pleasure refers to the degree to which users feel happy or satisfied with an environment; arousal refers to how users feel excited or active in a particular situation; dominance refers to the degree to which users feel free to act or in control of a situation. The PAD theory has proven to be particularly valid for analysing emotional responses shaped by the environment that affect individual behaviours (Chang et al ., 2014; Krey et al ., 2018). In the context of offline commerce in retail stores, PAD refers to the emotions that consumers experience when they interact with the physical store environment.…”

“…Arousal may be related to lighting, music, and product layout. And dominance may be related to the organisation and design of the store (Krey et al ., 2018). In the online realm, PAD theory has been successfully used to analyse usage intention of technology interfaces (apps, websites, etc.)…”

Environmental Features Influence Walking Speed: The Effect of Urban Greenery

“…This theory by Mehrabian and Russell [46] has been extensively tested in consumer research (for a review, see [50,51]), specifically in studies that investigated the effects of various dimensions of retail environments (e.g., temperature, noise, music, layout, equipment, signs, symbols) on customer reactions. Our previous study [42] explored whether the approach-avoidance model can be used to explain changes in walking speed in sections with different environmental features.…”