As early as 1896, Wundt proposed three fundamental dimensions to describe the affective meaning of stimuli: originally labelled as (pleasure), spannung (tension), and beruhigung (inhibition). A century later, Osgood (1964) took a representative sample from data retrieved with his semantic differential technique, and performed a factor analysis on the data. 50% of the variance in the judgments was accounted for by three factors that they termed evaluation (represented by scales such as good-bad, pleasant-unpleasant, and positive-negative), potency (represented by scales such as strong-weak, heavy-light, and hard-soft), and activity (represented by scales such as fast-slow, active-passive, and excitable-calm). Osgood: “What this means is that there are at least three 'directions' in the semantic space which are regions of relatively high density, in the sense of many closely related modes of qualifying, and that these 'directions' tend to be orthogonal to each other, in the sense of being independently variable dimensions of meaning.” Moreover, these factors seem to be closer to connotative than to denotative aspects of meaning. Osgood and his team also suggested that the spatial dimensions of the semantic space may not be arbitrary, but that they are rather a 'natural' built-in structuring of the semantic space, analogous to the gravitational and magnetic determinants of geophysical space. The same dimensional structure held equally well for verbal items in non-English speaking cultures, as well as for judgments of nonverbal stimuli as different as sonar signals and aesthetic paintings, providing evidence for a universal framework underlying certain affective or connotative aspects of language.

Mehrabian and Russell (1974) found that similar dimensions underlay judgments of facial expressions, hand and bodily movements, and postural positions. They constructed a set of verbal texts describing various situations, and a new semantic differential scale for rating them. Factor analysis confirmed three components in emotional judgments: pleasure (evaluation), arousal (activity), and dominance (potency).

In their bio-informational theory, Bradley & Lang (1994) followed Wundt's theoretical categories. They equally used the terms pleasure, dominance, and arousal as the key factors in how humans perceive and evaluate a wide variety of objects, words, and events. Subsequent empirical research has consistently confirmed this three-factor model.

The fact that these dimensions can explain a significant amount of variation across various stimuli suggests they play a fundamental role in organizing both our semantic and affective experiences.  Osgood: “The highly generalized nature of the affective reaction system — the fact that it is independent of any particular sensory modality and yet participates with all of them — appears to be the psychological basis for the cross-culturality of three factors of Evaluation, Potency, and Activity, as well as the basis for Synesthesia and metaphor”. With these three universal factors as the basis, the three dimensions of the SCS: depth, height, and width, can be given a function.