Affective word norms are essential for stimulus control in affective science, experimental psychology, and psycholinguistics, yet Urdu remains underrepresented in established lexical norm resources. The present study developed Urdu valence, arousal, and dominance (VAD) norms for a culturally adapted set of affective words derived from a Pakistan-grounded English VAD lexicon, which was then translated and culturally adapted and normed in Urdu. Using a cross-sectional, laboratory-based design, 240 Pakistani university students and young adults rated one of four stimulus lists. The final dataset comprised 320 Urdu words, with each word receiving 60 valid ratings. For each item, word-level means, standard deviations, valid ns, standard errors, and 95% confidence intervals were computed for valence, arousal, and dominance. The resulting lexicon showed broad coverage across affective space, high internal stability of word-level means across repeated random rater splits, and coherent dimensional associations among valence, arousal, and dominance. Category-based analyses further indicated that the item-construction strategy successfully distributed the final word set across distinct affective regions. The primary contribution of the study is an Urdu VAD norms resource that provides an empirically grounded basis for selecting, matching, and interpreting Urdu verbal stimuli in affective and psycholinguistic research. More broadly, the findings reinforce the importance of establishing affective properties in the target language rather than inferring them from translation alone.
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