[1][2] Its initial use was in a theory of environmental psychology, the core idea being that physical environments influence people through their emotional impact.
[5][6] The PA part of PAD was developed into a circumplex model of emotion experience, and those two dimensions were termed "core affect".
The PAD (Pleasure, Arousal, Dominance) model has been used to study nonverbal communication such as body language in psychology.
The abbreviated model has also been used in organizational studies where the emotions towards specific entities or products marketed by the respective organisations are measured.
For instance, Becker et al. describes how primary and secondary emotions can be mapped via the PAD space to features in the faces of animated characters to reflect happiness, boredom, frustration or annoyance.
A mid-level Partial Expression Parameters (PEP) space is then used in a two-level structure: the PAD-PEP mapping and the PEP-FAP translation model.