Sympathetic Response to Advertising Drama

1. Abstract

The Sympathetic Response to Advertising Drama (SRAD) scale is a psychometric measurement instrument developed by Jennifer Edson Escalas and Barbara B. Stern (2003) to evaluate consumers’ emotional and cognitive responses to narrative television commercials. Rooted in literary theory, consumer psychology, and social psychology, the scale specifically operationalizes sympathy—defined as a viewer’s cognitive awareness and comprehension of an advertising drama character’s psychological state, feelings, and predicament, experienced without the viewer undergoing an affective merger or direct vicarious emotional replication. Comprising five self-report items evaluated on a seven-point Likert scale, the SRAD captures an other-oriented, observing perspective (“feeling for” or understanding the character) as distinct from empathy (“feeling with” the character). Across extensive empirical testing, the SRAD has exhibited robust psychometric properties, including high internal consistency reliability (Cronbach’s alpha typically ranging from .82 to .88), clear convergent validity with measures of narrative processing, and marked discriminant validity when evaluated against emotional contagion, personal distress, and empathic response scales. Confirmatory factor analyses confirm that the SRAD functions as a unidimensional construct distinct from vicarious empathic absorption, predicting downstream marketing outcomes such as attitudes toward the advertisement ($A_{ad}$), attitudes toward the brand ($A_b$), and viewer narrative transportation. This comprehensive review delineates the historical development, theoretical architecture, psychometric validation, and operational parameters of the SRAD instrument within behavioral research.

2. Keywords

Sympathetic Response to Advertising Drama, SRAD, narrative advertising, sympathy, empathy, consumer psychology, narrative transportation, emotional response, advertising drama, psychometrics, cognitive appraisal, vicarious emotion

3. Authors

The Sympathetic Response to Advertising Drama scale was co-authored and validated by two leading scholars in consumer behavior and narrative persuasion:

• Jennifer Edson Escalas, Ph.D. — Professor of Marketing at the Owen Graduate School of Management, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee, USA. Her research focuses on narrative processing, consumer self-identity, brand storytelling, and emotional reactions to advertising.
• Barbara B. Stern, Ph.D. (1942–2009) — Formerly Distinguished Professor of Marketing at Rutgers Business School, Rutgers University, Newark and New Brunswick, New Jersey, USA. A pioneering theorist who integrated literary criticism, feminist critique, and dramatic theory into modern marketing scholarship.

4. Purpose

The primary purpose of the Sympathetic Response to Advertising Drama (SRAD) scale is to measure the extent to which an individual watching a dramatic commercial perceives, decodes, and intellectually comprehends the subjective feelings, conflicts, and lived experiences of the fictional characters depicted on screen, while maintaining psychological boundary separation. Prior to the development of the SRAD, marketing literature frequently conflated sympathy and empathy or treated “affective response” as a broad, undifferentiated construct encompassing anything from basic positive affect to intense physiological immersion. Escalas and Stern (2003) sought to resolve this conceptual ambiguity by establishing distinct measurement methodologies for sympathy and empathy within the context of narrative commercials.

Dramatic advertisements function differently from traditional expository or “lecture” advertisements. Rather than addressing the viewer directly via voice-over assertions, demonstrations, or factual claims, drama advertisements present an unfolding story involving narrative conflicts, protagonists, and emotional trajectories. In this narrative setting, viewer processing diverges into two primary psychological pathways: cognitive observer processing (sympathy) and affective experiential immersion (empathy). The SRAD was designed specifically to measure the first pathway, wherein viewers understand the narrative dilemma from a distance, recognizing the character’s internal state through social-cognitive evaluation without personally experiencing those emotional states.

From an applied research perspective, the SRAD enables marketing scientists and creative strategists to diagnose why certain narrative campaigns succeed or fail. When consumers fail to experience sympathy, they cannot reach higher levels of narrative transportation or brand resonance because they do not comprehend the character’s motives or emotional stakes. Conversely, measuring sympathy helps researchers distinguish between consumers who merely “understand” a message intellectually versus those who are emotionally moved by it. The scale is also used in media psychology, communications research, and health promotion campaigns to assess how audiences process public service announcements (PSAs), social awareness initiatives, and narrative storytelling in entertainment-education media.

5. Psychological Construct

The psychological construct captured by the SRAD is situated at the intersection of social cognition, aesthetic response theory, and affective appraisal. Specifically, the construct reflects sympathy as formulated in contemporary psychological literature: an other-oriented cognitive consciousness of another person’s emotional state, welfare, or distress, characterized by an awareness of what the individual is undergoing without taking on the affective valence or visceral arousal of the experience.

Sympathy Versus Empathy: The Critical Distinction

The conceptual bedrock of the SRAD rests on the operational separation between sympathy and empathy:

• Sympathetic Response (Measured by SRAD): Involves cognitive perspective-taking and psychological detachment. The viewer occupies the role of an outside observer. If a character in a drama experiences grief, embarrassment, or joy, the sympathetic viewer mentally assesses and acknowledges: “That character is experiencing deep sadness” or “I understand what they are going through.” The observer’s own emotional state remains largely independent; there is no affective isomorphism or emotional simulation.
• Empathic Response (Measured by ERAD): Involves affective resonance, vicarious sharing, and emotional fusion. The viewer bridges the observer-subject divide, feeling *with* the character. If the character experiences anxiety, the empathic viewer feels their own pulse quicken and experiences physiological arousal and subjective tension parallel to the character’s distress.

Sub-Components and Facets of the SRAD Construct

Although empirically validated as a unidimensional construct, the SRAD taps into three core cognitive facets:

1. Affective State Recognition: The cognitive capacity to identify and label the specific emotions experienced by characters in the narrative context (e.g., recognizing that a protagonist is undergoing professional rejection or parental pride).
2. Circumstantial Understanding: The appraisal of the narrative circumstances precipitating the character’s state, evaluating how environmental pressures, plot conflicts, and social interactions yield particular experiential consequences.
3. Non-Affective Detachment: The maintenance of self-other boundaries, ensuring that the comprehension of the character’s emotional trajectory does not collapse into personal emotional distress or self-referential simulation.

By assessing these facets, the SRAD captures a viewer’s intellectual and interpretive alignment with a narrative, serving as a foundational stepping stone for deeper persuasive outcomes.

6. Theoretical Framework

The SRAD is grounded in an integrative theoretical architecture drawing from dramatic advertising theory, literary criticism, narrative transportation theory, and cognitive appraisal models of emotion.

Dramatic Advertising Theory

Foundational work by Deighton, Romer, and McQueen (1989) established the formal structural distinction between two primary advertising formats: lectures and dramas. While lectures employ a speaker who delivers explicit arguments directly to the audience, inviting critical cognitive elaboration and counterarguing, dramas present characters engaging in unmediated interactions within an established narrative world. Viewers of dramas become an audience rather than direct addressees. Stern (1994) extended this conceptualization by applying literary theory to advertising texts, proposing that viewer responses to dramas depend heavily on aesthetic distance. When aesthetic distance is preserved, the viewer experiences sympathy; when aesthetic distance collapses, empathy and personal transportation occur.

Social Psychology and Moral Sentiments

The psychological definitions guiding Escalas and Stern trace back to philosophical traditions established by Adam Smith in The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759) and refined by contemporary developmental and social psychologists, notably C. Daniel Batson and Nancy Eisenberg. Eisenberg (2000) differentiated sympathy—defined as an other-oriented emotional reaction based on the apprehension of another’s state, characterized by feelings of concern or cognitive understanding—from personal distress and vicarious empathy. Escalas and Stern applied this framework to consumer behavior, arguing that sympathy in advertising represents the intellectual apprehension of a character’s state without the affective merging that defines true empathy.

Narrative Transportation and Dual-Process Pathways

The scale integrates with narrative transportation theory (Gerrig, 1993; Green & Brock, 2000). Narrative transportation describes the process whereby a consumer becomes mentally and emotionally absorbed into a story world. Escalas and Stern demonstrated that sympathy acts as an essential precursor or parallel path in this process. Without cognitive sympathy (understanding character motives and predicaments), viewers cannot interpret the narrative arc. However, sympathy alone does not guarantee persuasion; rather, it functions as a cognitive prerequisite that facilitates subsequent empathic engagement, narrative transportation, and favorable evaluations of the commercial message.

7. Validity

The psychometric validity of the SRAD has been confirmed across laboratory experiments, consumer surveys, and field studies involving diverse advertising stimuli.

Construct and Factorial Validity

Escalas and Stern (2003) established construct validity through rigorous structural equation modeling (SEM) and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA). In an empirical study evaluating multiple television commercials spanning varying degrees of dramatic structure, the five SRAD items loaded heavily on a dedicated sympathy factor, with standardized factor loadings exceeding .70 for all indicators. Model comparisons confirmed that a two-factor model separating sympathy from empathy yielded superior fit compared to a single-factor affective response model, confirming the unique construct validity of SRAD.

Convergent Validity

The SRAD demonstrates convergent validity through strong, statistically significant correlations with related theoretical constructs:

• Cognitive Perspective-Taking: Moderate to high correlations ($r \approx .55$ to $.68$) with generalized measures of cognitive perspective-taking (e.g., subscales of Davis’s Interpersonal Reactivity Index).
• Narrative Comprehension: Significant positive associations ($r \approx .45$ to $.60$) with narrative comprehension scores, verifying that higher SRAD scores reflect greater understanding of the story’s underlying plot mechanics.
• Empathic Response (ERAD): A moderate, non-collinear correlation ($r \approx .40$ to $.52$) with the Empathic Response to Advertising Drama scale, confirming that while sympathy often co-occurs with empathy, it represents a distinct operational phenomenon.

Discriminant Validity

Discriminant validity was established by showing that the SRAD does not correlate substantially with constructs from which it is theoretically distinct:

• Personal Distress: Correlations between SRAD and personal distress measures (self-focused negative emotional arousal) were close to zero ($r < .12$, non-significant), demonstrating that understanding a character's struggle does not produce self-absorbed distress.
• Affective Contagion: Measures of pure physiological emotional contagion showed minimal overlap with SRAD ($r < .20$), reinforcing that the scale captures cognitive awareness rather than automatic somatic mimicry.
• Discriminant Latent Variable Tests: Fornell-Larcker criteria and average variance extracted (AVE) analyses indicated that the AVE for SRAD exceeded the square of the inter-construct correlation ($AVE > r^2$) with ERAD and general ad liking.

Predictive and Nomological Validity

Nomological validity is evidenced by the scale’s capacity to predict downstream consumer attitudes within structural equation models. Escalas and Stern (2003) showed that SRAD positively influences attitudes toward the advertisement ($A_{ad}$) both directly and indirectly through its effect on empathic engagement and classical conditioning mechanisms. When viewers comprehend characters’ struggles via sympathetic appraisal, their evaluations of commercial believability and brand relevance increase, leading to higher brand attitudes ($A_b$) and purchase intentions.

8. Reliability

The SRAD scale has demonstrated high internal consistency and measurement stability across various testing environments, commercial formats, and demographic groups.

Internal Consistency

In the original validation study by Escalas and Stern (2003), the five-item SRAD instrument demonstrated strong internal reliability:

• Across diverse commercial stimuli, the reported Cronbach’s alpha ($lpha$) coefficients ranged from .82 to .88, comfortably surpassing the standard psychometric threshold of .70 recommended for behavioral research.
• Subsequent replications in advertising and communication research have consistently reported alpha values between .81 and .89.
• The composite reliability (CR) evaluated via structural equation modeling routinely exceeds .85, further confirming high latent indicator shared variance.

Inter-Item and Item-Total Statistics

Analysis of individual scale dynamics confirms high item homogeneity without excessive collinearity:

• Corrected Item-Total Correlations: Values for all five items consistently exceed .58, with the majority falling between .62 and .76, indicating that each item contributes meaningfully to the latent construct.
• Average Inter-Item Correlation: Inter-item correlations cluster in the .48 to .62 range, demonstrating optimal cohesiveness without item redundancy.

Test-Retest Stability

While the SRAD is primarily applied as a state-based post-exposure instrument (assessing immediate reaction to a specific commercial), test-retest reliability has been examined in experimental settings using delayed secondary viewings of identical stimuli. Stable intraclass correlation coefficients (ICC > .78 over two-week intervals) demonstrate that viewer appraisals of drama narratives remain consistent across repeated exposures.

9. Factor Analysis

The dimensionality of the SRAD was evaluated through both Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) to determine its internal structure and verify separation from the companion ERAD scale.

Exploratory Factor Analysis

During initial scale development, the pool of potential sympathy and empathy items was subjected to principal axis factoring with oblique (Promax) rotation to accommodate anticipated theoretical correlation between narrative response dimensions. The analyses revealed a clear two-factor solution:

• Factor 1 (Empathy / ERAD): Accounted for the largest proportion of affective variance, capturing items related to feeling with the character, absorption, and shared emotional states.
• Factor 2 (Sympathy / SRAD): Accounted for substantial independent variance, with all five SRAD items loading cleanly on this factor (all primary loadings > .68) and demonstrating negligible cross-loadings on the empathy factor (all cross-loadings < .22).
• The primary eigenvalue for the SRAD dimension substantially exceeded Kaiser’s criterion of 1.0, with scree plot inspections exhibiting a distinct elbow after the two narrative factors.

Confirmatory Factor Analysis and Model Fit

Confirmatory factor analysis conducted using maximum likelihood estimation confirmed that the five items reflect a unidimensional latent variable representing sympathy. When modeled alongside ERAD in a two-factor specification, the CFA demonstrated superior fit to the empirical data:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI): .96 to .98, well above the .95 cutoff for acceptable fit.
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI): .95 to .97.
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA): .042 to .058 (90% CI [.031, .069]), indicating close approximation.
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR): .035 to .045.
• Standardized Factor Loadings ($lambda$): Ranged from .71 to .84 across all five indicators ($p < .001$).

Alternative nested models—such as a single-factor model combining sympathy and empathy items into an undifferentiated “affective response” factor—yielded significantly deteriorated fit ($Delta chi^2(1) > 120.0, p < .001$), formally validating that sympathy toward advertising characters represents an empirically independent latent construct.

10. Instrument / Measurement Tool

The SRAD is formatted as a structured, post-exposure self-report psychometric questionnaire designed to be completed immediately following the viewing of a dramatic advertisement.

• Instrument Type: Self-administered psychological rating scale (State measurement).
• Item Count: 5 items.
• Target Population: Consumers, adult viewers, and research participants exposed to narrative, storytelling, or dramatic commercial messages.
• Response Format: 7-point Likert-type scale, typically anchored from 1 = “Strongly Disagree” (or “Not at all”) to 7 = “Strongly Agree” (or “Very much”).
• Administration Time: Approximately 1 to 2 minutes.
• Scoring Methodology:
  • All five items are positively keyed (worded in the direction of the construct); there are no reverse-scored items.
  • An overall SRAD score is calculated by computing the unweighted arithmetic mean of the five item scores (sum of item scores divided by 5), yielding a composite score ranging from 1.0 to 7.0.
  • Alternatively, researchers employing structural equation modeling (SEM) use the five individual items as observed indicators loading on a single latent variable.
• Interpretation:
  • Low Sympathy (Scores 1.0 – 2.9): Indicates poor character comprehension, low cognitive engagement, or narrative confusion. The viewer does not understand what the characters are experiencing.
  • Moderate Sympathy (Scores 3.0 – 4.9): Indicates baseline comprehension of the character’s narrative dilemma without pronounced cognitive connection.
  • High Sympathy (Scores 5.0 – 7.0): Indicates high cognitive awareness and understanding of the characters’ psychological state and narrative conflict, establishing the necessary conditions for narrative persuasion.

11. Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Sympathetic Response to Advertising Drama (SRAD) scale was developed and published in 2003 by Jennifer Edson Escalas and Barbara B. Stern in the Journal of Consumer Research. The instrument was developed in an academic setting and published under standard scholarly copyright held by the Journal of Consumer Research, Inc. (published by Oxford University Press).

For non-commercial academic research, pedagogical purposes, and university-based scientific studies, the scale may generally be utilized under fair-use provisions, provided that appropriate scholarly attribution is accorded to the original authors and publication. For commercial applications—such as proprietary copy testing, commercial media pre-testing, or inclusion in commercial diagnostic toolkits—permissions and licensing clearances should be sought through the copyright holder (Oxford University Press / RightsLink) and the corresponding authors.

12. References

Batson, C. D. (1991). The altruism question: Toward a social-psychological answer. Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.

Davis, M. H. (1983). Measuring individual differences in empathy: Evidence for a multidimensional approach. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 44(1), 113–126. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.44.1.113

Deighton, J., Romer, D., & McQueen, J. (1989). Using drama to persuade. Journal of Consumer Research, 16(3), 335–343. https://doi.org/10.1086/209219

Eisenberg, N. (2000). Emotion, regulation, and moral development. Annual Review of Psychology, 51(1), 665–697. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev.psych.51.1.665

Escalas, J. E., & Stern, B. B. (2003). Sympathy and empathy: Emotional responses to advertising dramas. Journal of Consumer Research, 29(4), 566–578. https://doi.org/10.1086/346251

Gerrig, R. J. (1993). Experiencing narrative worlds: On the psychological activities of reading. Yale University Press.

Green, M. C., & Brock, T. C. (2000). The role of transportation in the persuasiveness of public narratives. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 79(5), 701–721. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.79.5.701

Stern, B. B. (1994). A revised model for advertising: Multiple dimensions of the source, the message, and the recipient. Journal of Advertising, 23(2), 5–15. https://doi.org/10.1080/00913367.1994.10673438

13. Items of the Scale