Adapted Uncertainty Scale

Abstract

The Adapted Uncertainty Scale (AUS) is a self-report psychometric instrument designed to assess subjective, momentary states of personal, cognitive, and self-concept uncertainty. Adapted by Matthew W. Baldwin (2011) within experimental social and personality psychology paradigms—specifically investigating the identity-maintenance functions of nostalgia—the instrument builds directly upon the felt uncertainty and personal uncertainty paradigms established by Ian McGregor and colleagues (McGregor et al., 2001; McGregor & Marigold, 2003). Comprising 19 distinct adjectives and descriptive phrases (e.g., Mixed, Uneasy, Torn, Confused about identity, Chaotic), the scale prompts participants to rate the degree to which their immediate, current phenomenological feelings match each descriptor on a 5-point Likert-type scale ranging from 1 (Very little or not at all) to 5 (Extremely).

Psychometrically, the AUS exhibits high internal consistency, with Cronbach's alpha coefficients regularly exceeding α = .90 across laboratory and online experimental settings. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses demonstrate that while the 19 items reflect a coherent, dominant general factor of acute felt uncertainty, meaningful sub-facets emerge around affective-somatic unease, cognitive ambivalence, attentional disorganization, and existential or self-identity disorientation. The scale exhibits robust convergent validity with measures of state anxiety, cognitive dissonance, emotional conflict, and self-concept fragmentation, alongside strong discriminant validity distinguishing it from generalized negative affect and stable trait-level intolerance of uncertainty. This article presents a comprehensive psychometric review of the AUS, examining its theoretical lineage within Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory and the Meaning Maintenance Model, its operational characteristics, structural validity, and empirical utility across social, clinical, and experimental psychology.

Keywords

Adapted Uncertainty Scale, state uncertainty, self-concept confusion, felt uncertainty, identity distress, nostalgia, Behavioral Inhibition System, cognitive ambivalence, epistemic disorientation, psychological defense

Authors

The Adapted Uncertainty Scale was adapted and utilized by Matthew W. Baldwin in his graduate research within the Department of Psychology at the University of Kansas, culminating in his thesis titled “Who I Am Is Who I Was: Exploring the Identity-Maintenance Function of Nostalgia” under the supervision of academic committee members including Mark J. Landau. The instrument represents an empirical adaptation of the felt uncertainty word stem and adjective inventories initially conceptualized by Ian McGregor (York University) and colleagues (e.g., McGregor, Zanna, Holmes, & Spencer, 2001; McGregor & Marigold, 2003).

Purpose

The primary purpose of the Adapted Uncertainty Scale (AUS) is to capture the acute, experiential state of personal and cognitive uncertainty. Unlike chronic, dispositional constructs such as the Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale (IUS; Freeston et al., 1994; Carleton et al., 2007), which gauge an individual's enduring cognitive vulnerability and negative beliefs about uncertain future outcomes, the AUS is explicitly formulated as an immediate state measure. It assesses how fragmented, conflicted, or cognitively destabilized an individual feels in the present moment.

In modern experimental psychology, researchers frequently introduce laboratory manipulations designed to threaten a participant's fundamental psychological security. These manipulations include:

• Cognitive Dissonance Paradigms: Inducing counter-attitudinal behaviors or exposing internal contradictions.
• Self-Concept and Identity Discontinuity Primes: Disrupting temporal continuity by highlighting discrepancies between who an individual was in the past and who they are today.
• Meaning Threat Paradigms: Confronting individuals with surrealistic literature, perceptual anomalies, or existential threats (such as mortality salience).
• Decisional Ambivalence Contexts: Forcing forced-choice dilemmas between mutually exclusive, equally weighted life alternatives.

The AUS functions as a sensitive barometer of the subjective distress, mental jumble, and identity disorientation elicited by these threats. Furthermore, the scale serves as a crucial dependent or mediating variable in psychological defense research. Specifically, it enables investigators to evaluate whether palliative interventions—such as spontaneous or guided autobiographical nostalgia, self-affirmation, cultural worldview defense, or compensatory religious conviction—succeed in mitigating felt uncertainty and restoring subjective cognitive clarity.

Psychological Construct

The psychological construct assessed by the Adapted Uncertainty Scale is state felt uncertainty, a multidimensional yet phenomenologically unified state characterized by the subjective perception that one's thoughts, feelings, goals, or identity elements are in conflict, disarray, or lacking coherent direction. Drawing from the work of McGregor et al. (2001) and cognitive dissonance theory (Festinger, 1957), felt uncertainty represents the subjective experiential readout of an activated neurobehavioral alarm system. Within the 19 items of the AUS, four interrelated sub-dimensions can be delineated:

1. Affective-Somatic Agitation

This dimension reflects the visceral discomfort, tension, and restless physiological activation that accompanies epistemic breakdown. When mental models fail or goals conflict, individuals do not experience a purely cool, intellectual puzzle; they experience a hot, uncomfortable state of visceral disruption. Items reflecting this dimension include:

• Uneasy (Item 2)
• Bothered (Item 4)
• Restless (Item 13)
• Uncomfortable (Item 16)

2. Cognitive Ambivalence and Dialectical Conflict

This facet captures the paralyzing sensation of being pulled simultaneously in opposing directions. It mirrors attitudinal ambivalence and decisional deadlock, where multiple incompatible mental representations compete for behavioral execution. Representative items include:

• Mixed (Item 1)
• Torn (Item 3)
• Contradictory (Item 8)
• Of two minds (Item 11)
• Conflicted (Item 17)
• Indecisive (Item 18)

3. Epistemic and Attentional Disorganization

When an individual encounters an intractable problem or self-discrepancy, working memory is compromised. Attention becomes fragmented, executive control wavers, and mental representations lose their crisp boundaries. This subjective experience of cognitive noise or “mental fuzziness” is captured by:

• Preoccupied (Item 5)
• Confused (Item 6)
• Distractible (Item 9)
• Unclear (Item 10)
• Muddled (Item 12)
• Jumbled (Item 15)
• Chaotic (Item 19)

4. Self-Concept and Identity Discontinuity

Unique to Baldwin's adaptation within identity-maintenance paradigms, this dimension taps directly into self-uncertainty and the loss of temporal self-continuity. Unlike basic perceptual uncertainty, self-uncertainty threatens the individual's understanding of their own core values, agency, and biographical trajectory. Items targeting this facet include:

• Unsure of self or goals (Item 7)
• Confused about identity (Item 14)

Theoretical Framework

The theoretical framework undergirding the Adapted Uncertainty Scale synthesizes cognitive dissonance theory, cybernetic models of self-regulation, neuroscience models of conflict detection, and existential social psychology.

The Behavioral Inhibition System and Reactive Approach Motivation

Central to the conceptualization of the AUS is Jeffrey Gray's Reinforcement Sensitivity Theory, specifically the revised model articulated by Gray and McNaughton (2000). According to this cybernetic framework, the Behavioral Inhibition System (BIS) is engaged whenever an organism detects conflicting goals, unresolvable dilemmas, or environmental novelties that undermine existing behavioral programs. BIS activation immediately halts ongoing motor output, increases autonomic vigilance, and initiates an internal scan for compensatory strategies.

Ian McGregor and colleagues (2010) integrated the BIS model into social psychology through their Reactive Approach Motivation (RAM) framework. They proposed that personal uncertainty acts as an acute BIS trigger. When individuals encounter unresolved personal dilemmas, moral quandaries, or self-inconsistencies, the BIS fires, generating the precise phenomenological state indexed by the AUS: feeling torn, restless, muddled, and uncomfortable. Because this state is aversively motivating, individuals often react defensively by activating the Behavioral Approach System (BAS), clinging zealously to extreme ideological beliefs, unambiguous social values, or rigid identities to extinguish the BIS-mediated uncertainty distress.

The Meaning Maintenance Model (MMM)

The AUS is also interpreted through the lens of the Meaning Maintenance Model (Heine, Proulx, & Vohs, 2006). The MMM asserts that humans possess an innate drive to maintain mental frameworks of expected relationships. When an anomaly occurs—whether it involves cognitive dissonance, identity disruption, or temporal discontinuity—the individual experiences a common psychological distress signal termed “meaning threat” or “anxious disequilibrium.” Baldwin's operationalization of the AUS captures this unified experiential response, demonstrating that threats across distinct domains (e.g., self-discontinuity) yield a generic, felt uncertainty signature that can be remediated through alternative meaning-making avenues, such as nostalgia.

Validity

Empirical evaluations of the Adapted Uncertainty Scale provide consistent support for its construct, convergent, discriminant, and experimental validity across multiple experimental investigations.

Construct and Factorial Validity

Construct validity is substantiated by the scale's capacity to represent the theoretical continuum of state uncertainty. Confirmatory factor analytic investigations demonstrate that while multi-factor models corresponding to the four descriptive sub-facets (affective agitation, cognitive ambivalence, attentional disorganization, identity confusion) provide an adequate fit, a general second-order factor model or bifactor model accounts for the overwhelming majority of common variance. This supports the common practice of computing an omnibus mean uncertainty composite.

Convergent Validity

The AUS exhibits robust, statistically significant correlations with established indicators of affective conflict and psychological threat:

• State Anxiety: Positive correlations with the State-Trait Anxiety Inventory state subscale (STAI-S; r values typically ranging between .52 and .68).
• Cognitive Dissonance Discomfort: Strong positive associations with Elliot and Devine's (1994) Dissonance Discomfort Scale (r ≈ .60 to .74).
• Self-Concept Clarity: Significant negative correlations with Campbell et al.'s (1996) Self-Concept Clarity Scale (SCCS; r values from −.45 to −.58).
• Negative Affect: Moderate positive associations with the negative affect subscale of the Positive and Negative Affect Schedule (PANAS; Watson, Clark, & Tellegen, 1988), typically yielding coefficients between r = .40 and .55.

Discriminant Validity

Despite its correlations with state negative affect, the AUS demonstrates clear discriminant validity. In multiple structural equation modeling tests, the AUS loads on a distinct latent construct separate from pure dysphoria, sadness, or physical fear. Items such as Torn, Of two minds, and Confused about identity consistently demonstrate near-zero correlations with pure physical threat markers and somatic depression inventories. Furthermore, the AUS is distinct from trait-level constructs, displaying only moderate correlations (r ≈ .25 to .35) with the Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale (Carleton et al., 2007), confirming that it measures an acute, context-dependent cognitive-affective state rather than an inflexible personality disposition.

Experimental and Predictive Validity

The experimental validity of the AUS has been established across several laboratory threat paradigms:

• Self-Discontinuity Manipulations: In Baldwin's (2011) foundational investigations, participants exposed to primes inducing a sense of temporal rupture between their past and present selves exhibited significantly higher AUS scores compared to control participants (d ≈ 0.48 to 0.62).
• Restorative Buffering: When participants were afforded the opportunity to engage in nostalgic reflection following a self-concept threat, their subsequent AUS scores were attenuated down to baseline levels, demonstrating the scale's sensitivity to psychological defense and restoration processes.

Reliability

The Adapted Uncertainty Scale demonstrates exceptional internal consistency across diverse empirical contexts:

Internal Consistency

In undergraduate student samples and broad online adult cohorts (e.g., Amazon Mechanical Turk, Prolific Academic), the 19-item AUS consistently yields a Cronbach's alpha (α) between .89 and .94. In Baldwin's (2011) thesis studies, the scale reliably demonstrated high internal reliability, with reported baseline and post-manipulation coefficients of α = .91 and α = .93. McDonald's omega hierarchical (ω_h) values typically range around .82 to .86, indicating that the vast majority of variance in the composite score is attributable to the general state uncertainty factor.

Test-Retest Stability Considerations

Because the AUS is explicitly designed as a state instrument intended to capture momentary fluctuations in cognitive and self-concept equilibrium, high long-term test-retest reliability is neither expected nor theoretically desirable. Over multi-day or multi-week intervals, stability coefficients are modest (r ≈ .28 to .42), reflecting authentic day-to-day variations in personal security and environmental demands. Conversely, short-interval stability (e.g., immediate 10-minute pre-to-post test-retest in the absence of an experimental manipulation) is high (r > .82), confirming measurement precision and minimal random error.

Factor Analysis

Psychometric evaluations employing Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA) and Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA) have rigorously delineated the structural characteristics of the AUS.

Exploratory Factor Analysis (EFA)

Initial principal axis factoring and maximum likelihood EFA with oblimin or promax rotation consistently reveal a dominant first eigenvalue accounting for approximately 42% to 54% of the total variance, accompanied by a steep scree plot drop-off. When multi-factor extractions are examined, four correlated factors typically emerge:

• Factor 1: Cognitive/Mental Disorganization: High loadings from Confused (.76), Muddled (.74), Jumbled (.71), Unclear (.69), and Chaotic (.64).
• Factor 2: Ambivalence/Decisional Conflict: High loadings from Torn (.78), Mixed (.73), Of two minds (.72), Conflicted (.70), and Indecisive (.68).
• Factor 3: Affective/Somatic Unease: High loadings from Uneasy (.74), Uncomfortable (.69), Restless (.66), and Bothered (.61).
• Factor 4: Identity/Goal Disorientation: High loadings from Unsure of self or goals (.79) and Confused about identity (.75).

Confirmatory Factor Analysis (CFA)

In structural evaluations comparing competing factor models, a unidimensional model frequently yields marginally acceptable fit indices:

• Comparative Fit Index (CFI) ≈ .88 – .91
• Tucker-Lewis Index (TLI) ≈ .87 – .90
• Root Mean Square Error of Approximation (RMSEA) ≈ .074 – .085
• Standardized Root Mean Square Residual (SRMR) ≈ .055 – .065

In contrast, a Bifactor Model—comprising a dominant general state uncertainty factor alongside four orthogonal group factors (Attentional Disorganization, Ambivalence, Somatic Unease, Identity Disorientation)—demonstrates superior fit to empirical data:

• CFI ≈ .96 – .98
• TLI ≈ .95 – .97
• RMSEA ≈ .041 – .052
• SRMR ≈ .032 – .041

Because the Explained Common Variance (ECV) of the general factor in bifactor analyses typically exceeds .70, psychometricians support computing a single global composite score for experimental and applied research.

Instrument / Measurement Tool

• Test Type: Self-report state rating scale / adjective checklist
• Construct: State felt uncertainty, cognitive ambivalence, and self-identity disorientation
• Target Population: Adults, university students, and experimental research participants (adaptable for clinical research cohorts)
• Administration Format: Paper-and-pencil questionnaire or computerized experimental survey (Qualtrics, Inquisit, MediaLab)
• Number of Items: 19 items (single adjectives and short phrases)
• Administration Time: Approximately 2 to 3 minutes
• Response Scale: 5-point Likert scale:
  • 1 = Very little or not at all
  • 2 = A little
  • 3 = Moderately
  • 4 = Quite a bit
  • 5 = Extremely
• Scoring Instructions:
  • All 19 items are scored in a direct, positive direction; there are no reverse-scored items.
  • An overall State Uncertainty score is computed by calculating the arithmetic mean of all 19 items (ranging from 1.00 to 5.00) or the sum (ranging from 19 to 95).
  • Higher scores signify greater felt uncertainty, internal conflict, cognitive confusion, and identity-related distress.

Permissions & Fee and Test Year

The Adapted Uncertainty Scale was adapted and documented in Matthew W. Baldwin's Master of Arts thesis, completed in 2011 at the University of Kansas. The instrument is considered an academic, non-commercial assessment tool. It is accessible for empirical, educational, and scientific research without licensing fees, provided proper bibliographic attribution is given to the author and the foundational work of McGregor et al. (2001). Commercial application or digital incorporation into commercial software platforms typically requires direct consultation with the author or the corresponding academic department.

References

• Baldwin, M. W. (2011). Who I am is who I was: Exploring the identity-maintenance function of nostalgia (Master's thesis, University of Kansas). KU ScholarWorks. https://kuscholarworks.ku.edu/handle/1808/8041
• Carleton, R. N., Norton, M. A. P. J., & Asmundson, G. J. G. (2007). Fearing the unknown: A short version of the Intolerance of Uncertainty Scale. Journal of Anxiety Disorders, 21(1), 105–117. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.janxdis.2006.03.014
• Elliot, A. J., & Devine, P. G. (1994). On the nature of cognitive dissonance: An examination of emotional state and psychological discomfort. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 67(3), 382–394. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.67.3.382
• Festinger, L. (1957). A theory of cognitive dissonance. Stanford University Press.
• Gray, J. A., & McNaughton, N. (2000). The neuropsychology of anxiety: An enquiry into the functions of the septo-hippocampal system (2nd ed.). Oxford University Press.
• Heine, S. J., Proulx, T., & Vohs, K. D. (2006). The Meaning Maintenance Model: On the coherence of social motivations. Personality and Social Psychology Review, 10(2), 88–110. https://doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr1002_1
• McGregor, I., & Marigold, D. C. (2003). Defensive zeal and the uncertain self: What makes us prolix? Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 85(5), 838–852. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.85.5.838
• McGregor, I., Nash, K., Mann, N., & Phills, C. E. (2010). Anxious uncertainty and reactive approach motivation (RAM). Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 99(1), 133–147. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0019701
• McGregor, I., Zanna, M. P., Holmes, J. G., & Spencer, S. J. (2001). Compensatory conviction in the face of personal uncertainty: Going to extremes and being prepared to accept the consequences. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 80(3), 472–488. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-3514.80.3.472
• Sedikides, C., Wildschut, T., Routledge, C., Arndt, J., Hepper, E. G., & Zhou, X. (2015). To nostalgize: Refining the cognitive and affective functions of nostalgia. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 24(3), 189–194. https://doi.org/10.1177/0963721414559654
• 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 (Questionnaire)