Feelings Toward Ads Scale

1. Abstract

The Feelings Toward Ads Scale (FTA), introduced by Julie A. Edell and Marian Chapman Burke in their seminal 1987 publication, represents one of the most foundational psychometric instruments in consumer psychology, advertising research, and marketing communications. Developed to systematically capture and quantify multidimensional affective responses elicited during exposure to commercial advertising, the FTA challenged traditional cognitive-dominant paradigms such as the Theory of Reasoned Action and purely cognitive hierarchy-of-effects frameworks. The instrument measures consumer affective experience across three empirically distinct, correlated yet independent structural dimensions: Upbeat Feelings (13 items capturing active, high-arousal positive affect), Negative Feelings (12 items capturing aversive, critical, skeptical, and dysphoric reactions), and Warm Feelings (5 items capturing low-arousal, empathic, tender, and calm emotional states), totaling 30 validated affective descriptors derived from an initial pool of 52 items. Responses are gathered using a 5-point endorsement rating format ranging from 1 (‘Ad does not describe feelings/not at all’) to 5 (‘Ad describes feelings extremely well / very well’). Across extensive empirical evaluations, the scale demonstrates high internal consistency (Cronbach’s α typically ranging from .82 to .91 across subscales), robust test-retest stability, sound convergent and discriminant validity against generalized mood indices, and potent predictive validity regarding attitude toward the ad (Aad), attitude toward the brand (Ab), and brand cognition retrieval. This article provides an exhaustive psychometric review of the FTA, detailing its theoretical architecture, psychometric properties, structural equation modeling validation, administrative parameters, and complete authentic inventory.

2. Keywords

Feelings Toward Ads Scale, FTA, advertising affect, consumer emotion, Upbeat Feelings, Negative Feelings, Warm Feelings, attitude toward the ad, brand evaluation, affective response

3. Authors

The Feelings Toward Ads Scale was formulated, validated, and published by:

• Julie A. Edell (now Julie A. Edell Britton): Associate Professor of Marketing at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, United States. Dr. Edell’s research centers on marketing communications, affective information processing, memory for advertising, and nonverbal communication.
• Marian Chapman Burke: Associate Professor of Marketing at the Fuqua School of Business, Duke University, Durham, North Carolina, United States (at the time of scale development). Her scholarship investigated consumer information processing, cognitive and emotional responses to persuasive messaging, and marketing strategy.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Feelings Toward Ads Scale (FTA) is to provide an empirically rigorous, standardized self-report measurement tool to capture the phenomenological affective states experienced by individuals during direct exposure to marketing communications. Prior to the formal introduction of the FTA, marketing and communication researchers predominantly relied upon unidimensional cognitive appraisal measures (such as semantic differentials measuring good/bad, pleasant/unpleasant) or generalized positive/negative valence indices. Such frameworks conflated qualitative dimensions of human emotion, treating high-arousal excitement and low-arousal empathy as identical positive states, while overlooking the coexistence of mixed emotional states.

The scale was engineered to solve three critical theoretical and methodological challenges:

• Differentiating Discrete Emotional Profiles: General affective indices failed to differentiate how distinct positive emotions impact brand equity. The FTA distinguishes high-arousal enthusiasm (‘Upbeat’) from low-arousal tender affection (‘Warm’), showing that these dimensions have divergent antecedents and consequences for message persuasion.
• Capturing Affective Plurality and Ambivalence: Conventional scales forced affect onto bipolar continua (e.g., Happy vs. Sad). The FTA operationalizes feelings as unipolar dimensions, recognizing that an advertisement can simultaneously provoke high Upbeat feelings alongside substantial Negative or skeptical responses (such as emotionally complex public service announcements or edgy narrative humor).
• Deconstructing Mediational Pathways: In both clinical health communication and commercial advertising research, practitioners require tools to determine whether message execution variables (such as tempo, color palette, dramatic staging, narrative empathy, or celebrity endorsers) directly enhance brand perception or if their impact is fully mediated through consumer feelings.

Beyond commercial market research, the FTA has been widely adopted in applied psychology, health communication (e.g., evaluating anti-smoking, vaccination, or anti-drunk driving campaigns), political advertising analysis, and public policy research to monitor emotional reactance and prosocial message acceptance.

5. Psychological Construct

The core construct measured by the FTA is episodic, state-level affective response elicited during exposure to persuasive audio, visual, or multimodal stimuli. Unlike enduring emotional traits or general baseline moods, these feelings represent immediate experiential states provoked by structural and symbolic characteristics of an advertisement. The construct comprises three primary dimensions:

Upbeat Feelings

The Upbeat Feelings dimension reflects active, high-activation positive emotions characterized by vigorous engagement, exhilaration, vivacity, and playfulness. Comprising 13 distinct items (such as Active, Alive, Attractive, Carefree, Cheerful, Creative, Delighted, Energetic, Enthusiastic, Excited, Happy, Joyful, and Playful), this construct corresponds to high positive activation within the circumplex models of affect. Upbeat feelings drive processing engagement, elevate focal attention, stimulate dopamine-mediated reward anticipation, and enhance immediate message recall. In commercial contexts, upbeat affect is frequently generated through fast-paced narrative arcs, energetic musical scoring, vibrant color saturation, and humorous incongruity resolution.

Negative Feelings

The Negative Feelings dimension captures aversive, critical, dysphoric, and guarded emotional reactions triggered by message content, framing, or perceived manipulative intent. Operationalized through 12 specific emotional descriptors (including Angry, Annoyed, Bad, Bored, Critical, Disgusted, Irritated, Offended, Regretful, Sad, Skeptical, and Suspicious), this dimension represents defensive emotional processing. Negative feelings serve as strong indicators of psychological reactance, consumer cynicism, or perceived manipulation. While sad affect can occasionally function constructively in poignant charity campaigns, excessive irritation, boredom, or skepticism consistently exerts a potent downward drag on brand evaluations, often suppressing positive brand equity even when accompanied by high upbeat affect.

Warm Feelings

The Warm Feelings dimension measures low-arousal, tender, empathic, and affiliative emotional responses. Defined across 5 validated items (Affectionate, Calm, Emotional, Hopeful, and Warm), this construct represents feelings associated with social bonding, empathy, human connection, nostalgia, and soothing emotional security. Warm feelings differ fundamentally from upbeat excitement; they are characterized by autonomic physiological deceleration, parasympathetic engagement, and heightened moral sentiment. Empirical findings confirm that warm feelings are uniquely potent predictors of brand trust, customer loyalty, and long-term brand attachment, particularly in experiential, service, and family-oriented product domains.

6. Theoretical Framework

The theoretical foundation of the Feelings Toward Ads Scale rests upon the integration of cognitive appraisal theory, the dual-process models of persuasion (specifically the Elaboration Likelihood Model), and dimensional theories of emotion.

The Cognitive-Affective Dual Pathway

Traditional consumer behavior models posited a strictly cognitive hierarchy: Cognition → Affect → Conation. In contrast, Edell and Burke (1987) integrated affective primacy models, positing that feelings operate alongside and independently of cognitive brand assertions. The theoretical framework asserts that an advertisement triggers two concurrent processing channels: an objective cognitive assessment channel (evaluating brand claims, utility, price-point, and functional performance) and an experiential affective reaction channel (evaluating the immediate emotional experience produced by the narrative execution). These two pathways jointly determine the consumer’s Attitude Toward the Advertisement ($A_{ad}$) and subsequent Attitude Toward the Brand ($A_b$).

Circumplex and Pluralistic Affect Architecture

The FTA aligns with dimensional models of emotion (e.g., Russell’s circumplex model and Watson & Tellegen’s Positive and Negative Activation models), while asserting functional unipolar independence. The theoretical framework posits that rather than existing as opposite poles of an axis, positive high-arousal affect (Upbeat), positive low-arousal affect (Warm), and negative critical affect (Negative) reside on separate unipolar vectors. Consequently, an individual exposed to a dramatic or thought-provoking advertisement can simultaneously experience elevated Warmth due to an empathetic character arc, alongside elevated Negative feelings due to the depicted hardship, and moderate Upbeat feelings from an eventual positive resolution.

7. Validity

The Feelings Toward Ads Scale has undergone extensive empirical validation across multiple consumer demographic samples, media modalities (television commercials, radio broadcasts, print advertising, and digital video campaigns), and diverse product categories.

Construct and Factorial Validity

Construct validity was initially established through comprehensive exploratory factor analysis (EFA) and subsequent confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) conducted on consumer responses to diverse commercial executions. In the foundational validation studies, the three-factor solution accounted for the vast majority of common variance across ad executions, demonstrating strong discriminant validity between factors (with inter-factor correlations between Upbeat and Warm hovering around $r = .45$ to $.60$, while correlations between Negative and positive factors remained consistently low or negative, $r = -.15$ to $-.35$).

Predictive and Nomological Validity

Nomological validity is demonstrated through structural equation modeling linking the three FTA subscales to key dependent variables: Attitude Toward the Advertisement ($A_{ad}$), Cognitive Brand Beliefs ($C_b$), and Attitude Toward the Brand ($A_b$):

• Direct Impact on $A_{ad}$: Upbeat feelings consistently exhibit strong positive path coefficients to $A_{ad}$ ($eta = .35$ to $.55, p < .001$), Warm feelings contribute unique positive variance ($eta = .20$ to $.40, p < .001$), while Negative feelings exert an independent negative trajectory ($eta = -.25$ to $-.45, p < .001$).
• Incremental Variance in $A_b$: Regression models consistently demonstrate that adding the three FTA subscales to models containing only cognitive brand attribute beliefs increases the explained variance ($R^2$) in brand attitude by an incremental 15% to 30%, confirming that emotional responses provide substantial predictive power beyond pure cognitive evaluations.
• Domain-Specific Effects: Predictive validity studies demonstrate that Warm feelings uniquely predict brand evaluations for transformational and hedonic product categories (e.g., baby products, greeting cards, personal care), whereas Upbeat feelings are more predictive of immediate brand recall and purchase consideration in experiential food, sports, and entertainment categories.

8. Reliability

The psychometric reliability of the FTA has been confirmed across dozens of independent replications over the past four decades, consistently demonstrating high internal consistency across diverse populations and ad formats:

• Upbeat Feelings Subscale (13 items): Cronbach’s alpha ($lpha$) coefficients consistently range between $.88$ and $.93$, reflecting high internal consistency among the high-activation positive adjectives.
• Negative Feelings Subscale (12 items): Cronbach’s alpha ($lpha$) coefficients routinely range from $.81$ to $.89$. Given that the scale captures diverse manifestations of negative affect (ranging from sadness to irritation and suspicion), these coefficients confirm cohesive measurement of an overarching aversive-critical latent dimension.
• Warm Feelings Subscale (5 items): Cronbach’s alpha ($lpha$) coefficients generally span from $.80$ to $.87$, demonstrating strong reliability despite the concise item count.
• Test-Retest Stability: In split-half and repeated-exposure experimental designs with constant stimuli, intra-class correlation coefficients (ICC) exceed $.75$ over two-week intervals, indicating stable measurement of immediate post-exposure emotional response patterns.

9. Factor Analysis

The structural composition of the FTA was established by Edell and Burke (1987) via a systematic psychometric reduction process:

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

The developers initiated the scale construction with an exhaustive vocabulary pool of 52 emotional adjectives reflecting affective reactions to audiovisual communications. In initial testing, over 200 participants evaluated diverse television commercials representing varying product categories (durable goods, consumer packaged goods, services) and creative formats (humorous, slice-of-life, informative, problem-solution). Principal components analysis followed by Varimax and oblique (Promax) rotations revealed a clear three-factor structure. Adjectives displaying weak primary loadings (< .45), excessive cross-loadings (> .30 on secondary factors), or conceptual redundancy were iteratively removed, leaving 30 cleanly loading items distributed across the three dimensions.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) Fit Indices

Subsequent confirmatory factor analyses in advertising and communication literature have consistently affirmed the superiority of the three-factor correlated model over competing one-factor (unidimensional affect) and two-factor (bipolar positive vs. negative) models. Typical fit indices reported across contemporary CFA evaluations include:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): Values consistently exceed $.92$, frequently reaching $.95$ or higher in modern structural equation models.
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): Typically ranges between $.91$ and $.94$.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): Consistently maintains values between $.045$ and $.065$, with 90% confidence intervals well below the .08 threshold of acceptable fit.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): Typically falls below $.055$.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The Feelings Toward Ads Scale is structured as an itemized self-report checklist administered immediately following exposure to an advertising stimulus:

• Instrument Type: Standardized Self-Report Affective Rating Scale.
• Target Population: Adolescents, adults, and consumer samples across market research and experimental psychology settings.
• Total Item Count: 30 validated affective descriptors.
• Subscale Breakdown:
  • Upbeat Feelings: 13 items (Items 1 through 13)
  • Negative Feelings: 12 items (Items 14 through 25)
  • Warm Feelings: 5 items (Items 26 through 30)
• Authentic Response Scale: 5-point scale (ranging from 1 = ‘Ad does not describe feelings/not at all’ to 5 = ‘Ad describes feelings extremely well / very well’).
• Administration Time: Approximately 3 to 5 minutes to complete immediately following stimulus viewing.
• Scoring Protocol: Dimensional composite scores are derived by calculating the arithmetic mean (or cumulative sum) of the items within each subscale:
  • Upbeat Score = $rac{sum ( ext{Items } 1 ext{ to } 13)}{13}$ (Range: 1.00 to 5.00)
  • Negative Score = $rac{sum ( ext{Items } 14 ext{ to } 25)}{12}$ (Range: 1.00 to 5.00)
  • Warm Score = $rac{sum ( ext{Items } 26 ext{ to } 30)}{5}$ (Range: 1.00 to 5.00)
• Reverse Scoring: None. All items are coded in a unipolar positive endorsement direction for their respective latent construct.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Feelings Toward Ads Scale was developed and published in 1987 by Julie A. Edell and Marian Chapman Burke in the Journal of Consumer Research. Under standard academic fair use principles, the scale items and structure are available without licensing fees for academic, scholarly, and non-commercial research purposes, provided proper bibliographic citation is given to the original authors and journal publication. Commercial organizations, syndicated research agencies, and corporate entities utilizing the scale for proprietary consumer tracking studies should consult academic copyright policies or contact the original authors regarding proprietary implementations.

12. References

The foundational and supporting literature establishing the theoretical, structural, and psychometric properties of the FTA includes:

• Aaker, D. A., Stayman, D. M., & Hagerty, M. R. (1986). Warmth in advertising: Measurement, impact, and sequence effects. Journal of Consumer Research, 12(4), 365–381. https://doi.org/10.1086/208524
• 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
• Brown, S. P., & Stayman, D. M. (1992). Antecedents and consequences of attitude toward the ad: A meta-analysis. Journal of Consumer Research, 19(1), 34–51. https://doi.org/10.1086/209284
• 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
• Muehling, D. D., & McCann, M. K. (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
• Russell, J. A. (1980). A circumplex model of affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 39(6), 1161–1178. https://doi.org/10.1037/h0077714
• Watson, D., Clark, L. A., & Tellegen, A. (1988). Development and validation of brief measures of positive and negative affect: The PANAS scales. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 54(6), 1063–1070. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.54.6.1063

13. Items of the Scale