Positive Affect While Shopping

Abstract

The Positive Affect While Shopping scale is an empirically validated psychometric instrument designed to capture the transient emotional valence experienced by consumers within retail and service environments. Originally refined and deployed across multiple field and laboratory investigations by Ahlbom, Roggeveen, Grewal, and Nordfält (2023), the instrument evaluates subjective positive feeling states elicited by retail atmospherics, specifically examining how ambient stimuli such as background music interact with temporal shopping dynamics (weekdays versus weekends). The measure exists in two operational configurations: an abbreviated 3-item version focusing on fundamental positive valence (Happy, Pleased, Joyful) derived in part from foundational retail atmospherics research by Babin and Attaway (2000), and an expanded 5-item version that incorporates heightened affective activation (Delighted, Excited), capturing elements aligned with classical measures of affect such as the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS). Administered via a 7-point Likert-type response scale (1 = Strongly disagree / Not at all to 7 = Strongly agree / Very much), the scale yields a composite mean index where higher values reflect elevated in-store affective pleasure. Psychometric evaluations across diverse consumer cohorts reveal exceptional internal consistency (Cronbach’s α typically ranging from .88 to .95; composite reliability > .90), robust unidimensional factor structures confirmed via exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses, and rigorous convergent, discriminant, and criterion-related validity. The scale serves as a vital tool for consumer psychologists, retail strategists, and sensory marketing researchers investigating affective mediation within the classical Stimulus-Organism-Response paradigm.

Keywords

Positive Affect While Shopping, retail atmospherics, consumer emotion, shopping experience, in-store affect, environmental psychology, sensory marketing, customer mood, hedonic shopping, scale validation

Authors

The operationalization and validation of the Positive Affect While Shopping scale across extensive field studies were conducted by a consortium of scholars specializing in retail management, sensory marketing, and shopper psychology:

• Carl-Philip Ahlbom — Assistant Professor of Marketing, Department of Marketing, Stockholm School of Economics, Stockholm, Sweden; Research Fellow, Center for Retailing. His research investigates sensory marketing, in-store customer analytics, and retail technology integration.
• Anne L. Roggeveen — Charles Clarke Reynolds Professor of Retailing and Marketing, Babson College, Babson Park, Massachusetts, United States. A renowned scholar in retail experience, pricing strategies, and customer engagement, and former Co-Editor of the Journal of Retailing.
• Dhruv Grewal — Toyota Chair in Commerce and Electronic Business and Professor of Marketing, Babson College, Babson Park, Massachusetts, United States. Widely recognized for his foundational contributions to value-based pricing, retail atmospherics, and behavioral decision theory.
• Jens Nordfält — Professor of Retailing, University of Bath, School of Management, Bath, United Kingdom. His research focuses on in-store marketing, consumer behavioral psychology, and eye-tracking methodologies in commercial environments.

The lineage of the scale connects conceptually to earlier atmospheric measurement paradigms developed by Barry J. Babin (Louisiana Tech University) and Glenn A. Attaway (1949–2018), who pioneered the assessment of retail-induced customer affect as an antecedent of relationship quality and store loyalty.

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Positive Affect While Shopping scale is to provide an efficient, psychometrically sound, and context-sensitive instrument for quantifying the real-time affective states of consumers during commercial acquisition journeys. While broad measures of emotional states—such as Watson, Clark, and Tellegen’s (1988) PANAS or Russell’s (1980) circumplex model of affect—provide comprehensive assessments of generalized mood, they frequently introduce participant fatigue, survey burden, and non-contextual semantic noise when deployed in fast-paced retail and field-experimental settings. Consequently, consumer behavior researchers required an agile, focused operationalization capable of isolating the immediate hedonic valence generated by in-store environmental stimuli.

From an applied perspective, measuring consumer affect within brick-and-mortar and digital shopping environments is crucial because affective states govern key economic outcomes, including basket size, unplanned purchasing, in-store dwell time, willingness to pay, and long-term brand equity. Ahlbom et al. (2023) developed and calibrated this instrument specifically to untangle how atmospheric interventions—such as background musical tempo and volume—interact with temporal purchase mindsets. For instance, consumers shopping on weekdays often operate under goal-directed, time-constrained orientations, whereas weekend shoppers engage in experiential, hedonic browsing. The Positive Affect While Shopping scale allows researchers to isolate emotional arousal and pleasure as mediating mechanisms that translate physical environmental cues into behavioral approach or avoidance tendencies.

In academic inquiry, the scale serves as a standardized dependent variable, mediating variable, or manipulation check in sensory marketing experiments. By examining subtle variances across the three-item and five-item versions, researchers can selectively capture core emotional valence (pleasure and contentment) or include high-activation motivational states (excitement and delight). The scale’s brevity ensures high completion rates during intercept surveys, post-visit questionnaires, and mobile laboratory evaluations without degrading participant attentiveness.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct assessed by this instrument is state positive affect contextualized within consumer retail environments. Within contemporary affective neuroscience and psychological taxonomy, affect represents the neurophysiological state consciously accessible as the simplest raw feeling of pleasure or displeasure (valence) combined with activation or deactivation (arousal).

The Positive Affect While Shopping construct operates along a continuum of experiential positivity, encompassing both moderate-arousal contentment and high-arousal hedonic pleasure. The scale comprises five primary semantic markers:

• Happy: Represents a baseline assessment of positive subjective well-being and satisfaction. In a retail context, consumer happiness reflects a cognitive-affective congruence where environmental conditions meet or surpass latent consumer expectations.
• Pleased: Reflects hedonic gratification and evaluation of the encounter. It captures the consumer’s internal affirmation that the commercial space, service level, or merchandise assortment aligns comfortably with their current desires.
• Joyful: Encapsulates an elevated, intrinsically rewarding affective reaction. Joy reflects a pure emotional response often linked to unexpected delight, aesthetic harmony, or sensory pleasure experienced during the shopping journey.
• Delighted: Captures a high-valence, moderate-to-high arousal emotional surge typically triggered when customer expectations are not merely satisfied but meaningfully exceeded. Delighted shoppers demonstrate heightened susceptibility to exploratory browsing and impulsive buying behaviors.
• Excited: Denotes high-activation positive affect characterized by physiological arousal, energy, and appetitive approach motivation. Excitement prepares the consumer for dynamic engagement with retail displays, novel product interactions, and experiential commercial stimuli.

The construct is deliberately operationalized as a state rather than a trait. Trait positive affectivity refers to a stable, cross-situational disposition to experience positive moods. In contrast, in-store positive affect is an episodic, highly mutable construct sensitive to ambient parameters such as ambient lighting, olfaction, musical cadence, crowd density, and interpersonal service interactions. It functions dynamically across the shopper journey, experiencing real-time amplification or attenuation in response to continuous environmental inputs.

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical architecture underpinning the Positive Affect While Shopping scale is firmly anchored in environmental psychology and behavioral consumer decision theory. Three prominent theoretical frameworks illuminate its construct validity and operational necessity:

1. The Mehrabian-Russell Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) Model

Formulated by Mehrabian and Russell (1974) and subsequently adapted to retail marketing by Donovan and Rossiter (1982), the S-O-R paradigm posits that objective physical environmental features (Stimuli) evoke primary internal affective reactions within the individual (Organism), which subsequently drive observable behavioral outcomes (Response). In environmental psychology, the internal organismic state is classified along three dimensions: Pleasure, Arousal, and Dominance (the PAD model). The Positive Affect While Shopping scale serves as a targeted psychometric manifestation of the Pleasure dimension, isolating the emotional valence induced by commercial spaces and predicting approach behaviors such as extended store dwell time, spontaneous spending, and brand affinity.

2. The Broaden-and-Build Theory of Positive Emotions

Derived from positive psychology (Fredrickson, 2001), the Broaden-and-Build theory asserts that positive emotional states broaden an individual’s momentary thought-action repertoires, enhancing cognitive flexibility, open-mindedness, and curiosity. Within consumer environments, positive affect broadens visual attention and promotes exploratory behavior, leading shoppers to notice items outside their immediate shopping list. By expanding the consumer’s perceptual scope, positive affect facilitates basket diversification and bolsters hedonic spending.

3. Atmospheric Congruence and Temporal Mindsets

Ahlbom et al. (2023) advanced sensory marketing theory by demonstrating that the impact of retail atmospheric stimuli (such as music tempo) on affective states is moderated by the consumer’s temporal mindset (weekdays vs. weekends). On weekdays, when consumers harbor utilitarian, efficiency-driven goals, dissonant or overly intense atmospheric cues introduce cognitive friction, dampening positive affect. Conversely, on weekends, when consumers adopt experiential, exploratory mindsets, congruent sensory cues induce elevated states of delight and excitement. The Positive Affect While Shopping scale operationalizes the critical psychological bridge mediating these atmospheric and temporal interactions.

Validity

The psychometric integrity of the Positive Affect While Shopping scale has been substantiated across laboratory experiments, digital store simulations, and large-scale supermarket field studies involving tens of thousands of consumer transactions.

Construct and Convergent Validity

Construct validity is evidenced by strong, statistically significant correlations between the scale items and established markers of subjective shopping value. In empirical evaluations, Average Variance Extracted (AVE) values consistently surpass the recommended threshold of .50 (typically ranging from .71 to .84), demonstrating that the items capture substantial shared variance attributable to the underlying affective construct rather than measurement error. Standardized factor loadings across items consistently range from .82 to .94, confirming strong convergent validity.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established using the Fornell-Larcker criterion and the Heterotrait-Monotrait (HTMT) ratio of correlations. The square root of the AVE for the positive affect construct consistently exceeds its correlations with conceptually distinct constructs, such as utilitarian shopping value, perceived price fairness, store layout ease, and cognitive product involvement (HTMT ratios < .85). Furthermore, confirmatory factor analyses comparing a single-factor baseline against two-factor models (separating positive affect from perceived shopping friction or negative affect) demonstrate superior fit for multi-construct formulations, confirming that the scale does not conflate positive hedonic valence with the mere absence of negative emotions.

Criterion and Predictive Validity

The scale exhibits robust predictive and criterion validity across consumer outcome metrics. In empirical field studies (Ahlbom et al., 2023), elevated scores on the scale directly predicted increased spending volume (β = .18 to .26, p < .001), longer in-store transit times, and enhanced customer satisfaction. Furthermore, mediation analyses employing bootstrapping methodologies (5,000 resamples) revealed that positive affect significantly mediated the indirect path between background musical tempo and register basket size, confirming its validity as an operational proxy for internal shopper motivation.

Reliability

Across diverse empirical implementations, the Positive Affect While Shopping scale displays high internal consistency and measurement precision.

Internal Consistency

In the empirical investigations reported by Ahlbom et al. (2023), internal consistency statistics remained robust across multiple field and experimental iterations:

• Three-Item Version: In Study 1, Study 2, and Study 4 (evaluating weekday versus weekend shoppers in real supermarket settings), the three-item index (Happy, Pleased, Joyful) yielded Cronbach’s α coefficients between .88 and .92. Composite reliability values similarly exceeded .90, indicating minimal error variance.
• Five-Item Version: In Study 3 and Study 5 (incorporating Delighted and Excited), the full five-item scale demonstrated Cronbach’s α coefficients exceeding .93 (ranging up to .95), with McDonald’s ω values mirroring these elevated figures (ω > .93).

Test-Retest and Measurement Invariance

Because the instrument measures state-dependent emotional responses to fluctuating environmental cues, conventional longitudinal test-retest reliability is inappropriate. However, cross-sample reliability and metric invariance were systematically established. Multi-group confirmatory factor analyses across temporal subgroups (weekday cohorts vs. weekend cohorts) confirmed configural and metric invariance (ΔCFI < .01, ΔRMSEA < .015), indicating that the scale items assess the latent positive affect construct with identical psychological meaning regardless of the shopping day or demographic composition.

Factor Analysis

Structural evaluations of the Positive Affect While Shopping scale demonstrate an unambiguous, stable unidimensional factor structure for both the 3-item short form and the 5-item full version.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Principal Axis Factoring and Maximum Likelihood exploratory factor extractions conducted on calibration samples consistently extract a single dominant factor accounting for over 74% to 82% of total item variance. Eigenvalue extraction patterns display a prominent primary factor (eigenvalues typically > 3.6 for the 5-item variant and > 2.4 for the 3-item variant), with secondary factors exhibiting eigenvalues well below the Kaiser-Guttman threshold of 1.0 (typically < 0.45). Scree plot inspections demonstrate a sharp, unambiguous inflection point at the second factor, confirming unidimensionality.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

Confirmatory factor analytic models specified in structural equation modeling software (e.g., AMOS, Mplus, R lavaan) indicate exceptional fit indices for the single-factor specification:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .985 to .998 (exceeding the standard .95 cutoff).
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): .978 to .995 (confirming model parsimony).
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): .032 to .054, with 90% confidence intervals bounded below .07.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): .014 to .026 (substantially below the .08 threshold).

Standardized factor loadings (λ) across studies consistently exceed the stringent .80 criterion: Happy (λ = .88 – .92), Pleased (λ = .84 – .89), Joyful (λ = .86 – .93), Delighted (λ = .82 – .88), and Excited (λ = .80 – .86). These structural findings confirm that all items load onto a unified emotional continuum, eliminating the need for multidimensional scoring.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Instrument Name: Positive Affect While Shopping Scale
• Alternative Titles: In-Store Positive Affect Measure, Atmospheric Positive Affect Scale
• Target Population: Adult consumers, retail shoppers, online shoppers, and experimental participants in commercial environments
• Administration Format: Self-administered paper-and-pencil, mobile intercept, computer-assisted web interview (CAWI), or post-shopping survey
• Administration Duration: Less than 60 seconds (rapid completion)
• Number of Items:
  • Short Form (3 Items): Happy, Pleased, Joyful (used in Studies 1, 2, and 4 of Ahlbom et al., 2023)
  • Full Form (5 Items): Happy, Pleased, Joyful, Delighted, Excited (used in Studies 3 and 5 of Ahlbom et al., 2023)
• Response Format: 7-point Likert-type scale anchored from 1 = Strongly disagree / Not at all to 7 = Strongly agree / Very much
• Scoring Protocol: All items are positively framed (no reverse-scored items). Responses are summed and divided by the total number of completed items (3 or 5) to compute a single composite mean score. Composite scores range from 1.00 to 7.00.
• Score Interpretation:
  • 1.00 – 2.99: Low positive affect (reflects dissatisfaction, affective neutrality, or shopping-induced friction).
  • 3.00 – 4.99: Moderate positive affect (indicates standard utilitarian satisfaction or baseline affective neutrality).
  • 5.00 – 7.00: High positive affect (denotes elevated hedonic pleasure, shopping delight, and heightened receptivity to exploratory purchase behaviors).

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Positive Affect While Shopping scale was consolidated and published in its present experimental configurations in 2023 by Carl-Philip Ahlbom, Anne L. Roggeveen, Dhruv Grewal, and Jens Nordfält in the Journal of Marketing Research. The instrument draws upon public-domain semantic descriptors and historical atmospherics work by Babin and Attaway (2000).

Fee and Licensing: The scale is freely accessible for non-commercial academic research, empirical theses, and educational purposes under scholarly fair-use principles, provided appropriate citation is given to Ahlbom et al. (2023) and Babin & Attaway (2000). Commercial marketing organizations, retail consultancy firms, and proprietary consumer analytics platforms seeking to embed the scale within commercial diagnostic software must consult the copyright policies of the American Marketing Association (AMA) and SAGE Publications.

References

• Ahlbom, C.-P., Roggeveen, A. L., Grewal, D., & Nordfält, J. (2023). Understanding how music influences shopping on weekdays and weekends. Journal of Marketing Research, 60(5), 987–1007. https://doi.org/10.1177/00222437221150451
• Babin, B. J., & Attaway, G. A. (2000). Atmospheric affect as a tool for creating value and gaining share of customer. Journal of Business Research, 49(2), 91–99. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0148-2963(99)00005-6
• Donovan, R. J., & Rossiter, J. R. (1982). Store atmosphere: An environmental psychology approach. Journal of Retailing, 58(1), 34–57.
• Fredrickson, B. L. (2001). The role of positive emotions in positive psychology: The broaden-and-build theory of positive emotions. American Psychologist, 56(3), 218–226. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.56.3.218
• Mehrabian, A., & Russell, J. A. (1974). An approach to environmental psychology. MIT Press.
• 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

Items of the Scale