Emotional Response to Advertising Scale (ERA)

1. Abstract

The Emotional Response to Advertising Scale (ERA), developed by consumer psychologists Julie A. Edell and Marian Chapman Burke (1987), represents a watershed psychometric instrument designed to capture the complex, multidimensional nature of affective experiences elicited during advertising exposure. Prior to the introduction of the ERA, marketing and communications research predominantly conceptualized emotional processing through broad bipolar valence frameworks (e.g., positive versus negative affect) or unidimensional measures of attitude toward the ad ($A_{ad}$). Edell and Burke challenged this reductionist view by demonstrating that emotional reactions are phenomenologically distinct, multifaceted, and capable of co-occurring simultaneously. The ERA consists of 52 feeling descriptors evaluated on a 5-point Likert-type intensity metric ranging from 1 (“Not at all”) to 5 (“Extremely”). Through rigorous exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, the instrument delineates three distinct, robust dimensions: Upbeat Feelings (characterized by high-activation, surgent positive emotions such as active, cheerful, and enlivened), Warm Feelings (capturing low-to-moderate activation, tender, prosocial, and empathic states such as affectionate, contemplative, and peaceful), and Negative Feelings (encompassing critical, adverse, and deactivating reactions such as annoyed, skeptical, and sad).

Psychometric evaluations across diverse consumer cohorts and product categories demonstrate exceptional internal consistency, with Cronbach’s alpha coefficients regularly exceeding .85 across all three dimensions, and frequently surpassing .90 for the Upbeat and Negative subscales. The scale exhibits robust convergent, discriminant, and predictive validity, establishing that felt emotions explain significant incremental variance in brand evaluations, post-exposure attitudes, and behavioral intentions beyond traditional cognitive cognitive appraisals. Notably, the warm feelings dimension has emerged as a cornerstone in the literature on emotional and transformational advertising, demonstrating that tender emotions operate as primary mediators linking commercial execution variables to enduring brand equity. The ERA remains one of the most widely cited and foundational self-report instruments in advertising research, media psychology, and consumer sentiment evaluation.

2. Keywords

Emotional Response to Advertising, ERA Scale, affective response, consumer psychology, advertising effectiveness, warm feelings, upbeat feelings, negative feelings, attitude toward the ad, brand attitude, emotional advertising, psychometrics

3. Authors

The Emotional Response to Advertising Scale was conceptualized, developed, and empirically validated by:

• Julie A. Edell (Edell Britton): Associate Professor Emerita of Marketing at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, United States. Dr. Edell’s research centers on consumer information processing, cognitive and affective responses to marketing communications, and the structural dynamics of advertising effects.
• Marian Chapman Burke: Associate Professor of Marketing at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, United States. Dr. Burke’s scholarship focuses on retail strategy, marketing research methodologies, consumer decision-making, and emotional measurement in marketing environments.

Correspondence regarding the foundational validation studies was historically directed through the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, Durham, NC 27706.

4. Purpose

The principal purpose of the Emotional Response to Advertising Scale (ERA) is to provide a standardized, psychometrically rigorous, and granular self-report methodology for assessing the qualitative spectrum and quantitative intensity of consumer emotional states induced during exposure to commercial communications. For decades, advertising theory was dominated by high-involvement, rational-cognitive paradigms, epitomized by the Elaboration Likelihood Model (ELM) and the Hierarchy-of-Effects framework. Within these historical models, affect was routinely relegated to an ancillary status or treated merely as a peripheral cue with transient, non-cognitive influence. When emotions were measured, researchers customarily collapsed affective reactions into unidimensional polarities—such as pleasant versus unpleasant, or favorable versus unfavorable evaluative judgments—obfuscating the qualitative distinctions among discrete emotional states.

Edell and Burke (1987) identified a profound theoretical gap: consumers do not merely form a single, aggregated attitude toward an advertisement; rather, they experience a dynamic, multifaceted stream of subjective feelings while viewing or listening to an advertisement. The ERA was engineered to capture this phenomenological richness by systematically quantifying three underlying feeling dimensions. The fundamental clinical and research applications of the ERA span multiple domains:

• Diagnosing Advertising Executional Elements: The scale enables marketing scientists and creative strategists to dissect how specific executional levers—such as narrative pacing, musical tonality, character vulnerability, humor, and visual aesthetics—trigger specific emotional configurations.
• Testing Affective Mediation Models: The ERA serves as the gold standard in structural equation modeling for testing how felt emotions mediate the relationship between ad exposure, attitude toward the advertisement ($A_{ad}$), attitude toward the brand ($A_b$), and subjective brand beliefs ($B_b$).
• Investigating Affective Co-Occurrence: Unlike single-item or forced-choice measures, the ERA allows for the simultaneous measurement of divergent emotional responses, providing an empirical vehicle to explore emotional ambivalence, bitter-sweet narrative trajectories, and the paradoxical coexistence of upbeat and negative feelings.
• Cross-Media and Cross-Cultural Affective Profiling: The instrument is broadly utilized to benchmark emotional resonance across television, radio, digital interactive video, and social media platforms across diverse demographic and cultural groups.

5. Psychological Construct

The construct operationalized by the ERA is advertising-induced affective response, defined as the transient, phenomenological emotional states experienced by an individual during exposure to a persuasive communication. Edell and Burke purposefully differentiated “feelings” from cognitive “judgments” or “attitudes.” Whereas an evaluative judgment involves an assessment of the stimulus itself (e.g., deciding whether an advertisement is “well-produced,” “informative,” or “credible”), a feeling refers to the respondent’s own subjective, visceral experiential state (e.g., feeling “enlivened,” “comforted,” or “skeptical”). The ERA decomposes this experiential space into three distinct dimensions:

Upbeat Feelings

The Upbeat Feelings dimension reflects a state of high physiological arousal and positive hedonic valence. It mirrors concepts of surgency, enthusiasm, vitality, and exuberant joy found in classical models of emotion such as Russell’s Circumplex Model. Upbeat feelings are typically elicited by fast-paced, humorous, vibrant, and musically energetic commercials. When experiencing upbeat feelings, consumers report feeling active, adventurous, cheerful, elated, stimulated, and playful. In terms of consumer information processing, upbeat feelings function as energetic activators that heighten attention, boost brand recall, enhance spontaneous brand liking, and foster feelings of empowerment and optimism linked to product consumption.

Warm Feelings

The Warm Feelings dimension captures a uniquely social, empathic, and low-to-moderate activation positive affective state. It is characterized by tenderness, sentimental connection, peaceful tranquility, and emotional resonance. The items defining this subscale include affectionate, calm, comforted, contemplative, moved, loving, and warm. Unlike upbeat feelings, which rely on exuberant activation and entertainment value, warm feelings are evoked by narrative advertisements that emphasize human vulnerability, personal relationships, intergenerational bonding, nostalgia, and quiet acts of kindness. Theoretical work spurred by the ERA has shown that warm feelings play an irreplaceable role in humanizing corporate brands, cultivating consumer empathy, breaking down defensive resistance, and building deep, enduring brand attachment and trust.

Negative Feelings

The Negative Feelings dimension encompasses an array of adverse, discordant, and critical emotional experiences induced by advertising stimuli. These feelings range from high-activation irritation and defiance to low-activation boredom, dejection, and sadness. Specific indicators include angry, annoyed, bored, critical, disgusted, dull, offended, and skeptical. Negative feelings frequently emerge when consumers perceive an advertisement to be manipulative, patronizing, intrusive, clichéd, or aesthetically unappealing. Importantly, negative feelings can also be strategically elicited within narrative advertising frameworks—such as public service announcements (PSAs) combating addiction or charity appeals—where an initial induction of distress, guilt, or fear is subsequently resolved through a prosocial call to action. Capturing this dimension allows researchers to assess both accidental advertising backlash and the calibrated deployment of negative emotional framing.

6. Theoretical Framework

The ERA is grounded in a convergence of cognitive appraisal theories, the dual-process models of persuasion, and the psychology of emotional dimensionality. Historically, consumer research relied on the Fishbein multiattribute attitude model, which posited that attitudes are mathematical functions of cognitive beliefs regarding product attributes. However, in the late 1970s and 1980s, theorists such as Robert Zajonc (1980) challenged this cognitive hegemony with the provocative thesis that “preferences need no inferences,” arguing that affective reactions can precede, operate independently of, and dominate cognitive processing.

Edell and Burke synthesized Zajonc’s affective primacy thesis with contemporary emotion literature—specifically the multidimensional frameworks of Paul Ekman, Carroll Izard, and the semantic differential dimensions (Pleasure, Arousal, Dominance) developed by Mehrabian and Russell (1974). Rather than adopting a broad, generalized dimensional schema designed for environmental psychology, Edell and Burke recognized that the consumption of mass media represents a specialized context wherein emotions are uniquely structured by narrative framing, visual aesthetics, and persuasive intent.

The foundational theoretical assumption of the ERA framework is that affective responses and cognitive evaluations operate as parallel, interacting conduits of persuasion. Specifically, Edell and Burke postulated an integrative structural model:

Within this architecture, the feelings elicited by an advertisement do not merely spill over directly into brand evaluations; they exert a dual effect. First, they directly influence the global evaluation of the commercial itself ($A_{ad}$). Second, they systematically bias and reshape cognitive brand beliefs ($B_b$). For instance, warm and upbeat feelings can induce an interpretive lens that leads consumers to evaluate brand attributes more favorably, whereas negative feelings trigger heightened counterarguing and defensive cognitive vigilance. By demonstrating that the three feeling dimensions contribute uniquely and additively to predicting $A_b$ even after controlling for prior brand attitude and cognitive beliefs, the ERA substantiated the theoretical proposition that emotions are core structural components of the persuasion process rather than epiphenomena.

7. Validity

The psychometric validity of the Emotional Response to Advertising Scale has been extensively corroborated across diverse experimental and naturalistic investigations:

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity was established through comprehensive multi-sample exploratory and confirmatory factor analytic procedures conducted by Edell and Burke (1987). Factor matrices revealed that items within each hypothesized domain demonstrated substantial and uniform factor loadings, consistently exceeding the .50 benchmark, with primary loadings frequently ranging between .65 and .84. Convergent validity was further substantiated by correlating the ERA subscales with established psychological emotion inventories, including the Differential Emotions Scale (DES) and the Mehrabian-Russell PAD scale. Upbeat feelings correlated strongly with PAD Pleasure and Arousal dimensions, Warm feelings aligned selectively with Pleasure and interpersonal communion indices, and Negative feelings converged robustly with DES subscales of contempt, disgust, and anger.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established by verifying that the latent correlations between the three ERA factors were moderate and distinct from unity ($r < .50$). While Upbeat and Warm feelings correlate positively (typically $r = .35$ to $.55$), their structural separation is repeatedly affirmed: exploratory factor analyses with oblique rotation and confirmatory factor analyses consistently demonstrate that forcing Upbeat and Warm items into a single overarching “positive affect” factor results in a significantly deteriorated model fit ($\Delta\chi^2, p < .001$). Furthermore, the ERA dimensions successfully discriminate between advertisements intentionally crafted with differing creative strategies (e.g., slapstick comedy vs. heart-warming family drama vs. hard-sell comparative commercials).

Predictive and Incremental Validity

The predictive validity of the ERA is widely regarded as its most profound contribution to marketing science. In hierarchical regression and structural equation analyses, the three emotion dimensions consistently explain substantial incremental variance in $A_{ad}$ ($R^2$ increases ranging from 25% to 45%) and brand attitude $A_b$ over and above cognitive attribute evaluations. Crucially, Burke and Edell (1989) demonstrated that the three feeling dimensions predicted brand evaluations both immediately following ad exposure and following longitudinal delay intervals, confirming that affective responses captured by the ERA leave enduring traces in memory that guide consumer choice behavior.

8. Reliability

The ERA displays exemplary internal consistency and psychometric reliability across varied populations, product categories, and media contexts:

• Internal Consistency (Cronbach’s Alpha): Across the primary empirical investigations conducted by Edell and Burke (1987) involving hundreds of unique commercials and multiple consumer samples, the internal consistency coefficients remained exceptionally high:
  • Upbeat Feelings: $\alpha$ coefficients regularly range from .90 to .95, reflecting high homogeneity among items capturing energy, cheerfulness, and exuberant affect.
  • Warm Feelings: $\alpha$ coefficients consistently fall between .85 and .91, indicating robust internal coherence among tender, contemplative, and affectionate indicators.
  • Negative Feelings: $\alpha$ coefficients reliably span from .86 to .93, showing strong alignment among the disparate manifestations of advertising irritation, boredom, and skepticism.
• Composite Reliability: Subsequent structural equation modeling studies utilizing the ERA have confirmed composite reliability ($CR$) values comfortably exceeding the standard .70 threshold, with average variance extracted ($AVE$) values exceeding .50 for all three latent dimensions.
• Test-Retest Stability: While situational affective responses to an advertisement are theoretically transient and sensitive to immediate viewing contexts, test-retest reliability across repeated exposures to identical commercial stimuli within controlled laboratory sessions has demonstrated stability coefficients ranging from $r = .72$ to $r = .84$, indicating that the scale reliably measures stable stimulus-elicited affect rather than random measurement error.

9. Factor Analysis

The structural taxonomy of the ERA was established through rigorous analytical workflows involving exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses:

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

In the seminal 1987 investigation, Edell and Burke examined consumer reactions to a diverse corpus of 144 commercial advertisements across six major product and service categories. A broad pool of feeling adjectives was administered to respondents. Principal Axis Factoring followed by oblique (Promax) rotation was executed, reflecting the theoretical expectation that affective dimensions within real-world media consumption are correlated rather than strictly orthogonal. The factor analysis decisively extracted three dominant eigenvalues exceeding unity, accounting for the preponderance of common variance:

• Factor 1: Upbeat Feelings accounted for the largest percentage of initial common variance (approximately 38%), driven by high-loading items such as enthusiastic (.81), cheerful (.79), delighted (.77), enlivened (.76), and joyful (.75).
• Factor 2: Negative Feelings captured approximately 14% of the common variance, defined by loadings on items such as annoyed (.80), irritated (.78), critical (.72), disgusted (.71), and dull (.68).
• Factor 3: Warm Feelings accounted for approximately 9% of the common variance, anchored by items such as affectionate (.82), warm (.79), comforted (.74), moved (.71), and tender (.69).

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Subsequent confirmatory structural analyses have robustly supported this three-factor correlated model over alternative nested configurations (such as a single general affect factor or an unconstrained two-factor positive/negative model). Goodness-of-fit indicators for the three-factor model routinely meet or exceed rigorous psychometric criteria: Comparative Fit Index ($CFI > .92$), Tucker-Lewis Index ($TLI > .90$), and Root Mean Square Error of Approximation ($RMSEA < .06$, 90% CI [.048, .065]). Standardized factor loadings across all primary indicators remain uniformly strong ($p < .001$), confirming the construct stability of the tripartite framework across television, radio, and contemporary digital streaming formats.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The operational specifications of the Emotional Response to Advertising Scale are summarized below:

• Instrument Name: Emotional Response to Advertising Scale (ERA)
• Alternative Titles in Literature: Edell and Burke Affective Response Scale; Burke & Edell Feeling Inventory
• Authors: Julie A. Edell and Marian Chapman Burke (1987)
• Construct Assessed: Stimulus-induced affective responses along three primary dimensions (Upbeat, Warm, and Negative feelings)
• Test Format: Self-administered paper-and-pencil or computer-assisted questionnaire
• Item Count: 52 feeling descriptors (items)
• Response Scale: 5-point response scale (typically 1 = Not at all, to 5 = Extremely, describing how the commercial made the respondent feel)
• Target Population: Consumers, adolescents, and adults exposed to promotional, educational, or commercial media communications
• Administration Time: Approximately 8 to 12 minutes for the full 52-item inventory; subset short-forms require 2 to 4 minutes
• Scoring Procedure:
  • Scale scores for each of the three dimensions (Upbeat, Warm, Negative) are calculated by computing the unweighted arithmetic mean or cumulative sum of the ratings of the corresponding emotion items belonging to each factor.
  • No global composite score is calculated, as the three dimensions represent distinct experiential axes rather than a unidimensional scale.
  • There are no reverse-scored items within the individual factors, as all items reflect positive assertions of specific feeling states rated on an intensity continuum from absence (1) to maximum presence (5).

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Emotional Response to Advertising Scale was first published in 1987 in the Journal of Consumer Research. The instrument was developed within an academic research context and was made available to the scholarly community through its publication in peer-reviewed academic literature. Under standard academic fair-use guidelines, non-commercial researchers, university scholars, and educators may utilize, adapt, and administer the ERA descriptors for empirical investigation without royalty fees, provided proper formal bibliographic citation is accorded to Edell and Burke (1987).

Commercial practitioners, marketing agencies, syndicated research organizations, and corporate entities intending to deploy the scale in proprietary commercial pre-testing software or monetized analytics platforms are advised to review the copyright policies of the Journal of Consumer Research and Oxford University Press (the current publishing steward of the journal) to ensure compliance regarding commercial republishing and proprietary derivative rights.

12. References

Below are primary foundational references documenting the origin, theoretical architecture, and psychometric validation of the ERA:

• Batra, R., & Ray, M. L. (1986). Affective responses mediating acceptance of advertising. Journal of Consumer Research, 13(2), 234–249. https://doi.org/10.1086/209063
• Burke, M. C., & Edell, J. A. (1989). The impact of feelings on ad-based affect and cognition. Journal of Marketing Research, 26(1), 69–83. https://doi.org/10.1177/002224378902600106
• Edell, J. A., & Burke, M. C. (1987). The power of feelings in understanding advertising effects. Journal of Consumer Research, 14(3), 421–433. https://doi.org/10.1086/209124
• Holbrook, M. B., & Batra, R. (1987). Assessing the role of emotions as mediators of consumer responses to advertising. Journal of Consumer Research, 14(3), 404–420. https://doi.org/10.1086/209123
• Mehrabian, A., & Russell, J. A. (1974). An approach to environmental psychology. MIT Press.
• Muehling, D. D., & McCann, M. (1993). Attitude toward the ad: A review. Journal of Current Issues & Research in Advertising, 15(2), 25–58. https://doi.org/10.1080/10641734.1993.10505002
• Zajonc, R. B. (1980). Feeling and thinking: Preferences need no inferences. American Psychologist, 35(2), 151–175. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.35.2.151

13. Items of the Scale