Psychological experiences of pleasure and pain are internal judgments but they follow the same contextual premises that subjects adhere to when giving ratings to stimuli presented in the laboratory.

At the heart of a contextual theory of happiness is the assumption that pleasantness is a judgment where the underlying dimensions are degrees of freedom.

Also important to consider is the term context, defined as the conceptual representation of a set of events (real or imagined) that determine the dimensional judgment of any particular event [2] Parducci posited that when a stimulus is rated alongside other stimuli, its rating will depend in part on where it ranks among the stimulus set.

In two influential publications, Parducci provided a more nuanced delineation of the relationship between category judgment and different features of the stimulus context.

[3][4] Allen Parducci died in Pacific Palisades, California on August 6, 2023, at the age of 97.