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Sensation Seeking Scale

psychological instrument for measuring sensation seeking

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Record originEnglish Wikipedia
Text licenseCC BY-SA 4.0
Source revisionMay 30, 2026
Entity authorityQ16875710 ↗
Source-derived summary

The Sensation Seeking Scale is one of the most common psychological instruments for measuring sensation seeking. It was created in 1964 by Marvin Zuckerman, at the University of Delaware. Zuckerman created the scale with the purpose of better understanding personality traits such as neuroticism, antisocial behavior, and psychopathy. This has gone through a few iterations and is currently on its 1978 version: SSS-V. There are 4 different aspects (subscales), which are: Thrill and Adventure Seeking (TAS); Disinhibition (Dis); Experience Seeking (ES); and Boredom Susceptibility (BS). Each subscale contains 10 items, making a total of 40 items. Zuckerman has proposed that these 'traits' come from a psycho-biological interaction.

History

The first Sensation Seeking Scale (SSS) was created by Marvin Zuckerman and others in 1964. This was considered Form I and Form II was similar, though slightly revised. Analysis and use of these two forms showed that there was more than one dimension to sensation seeking behavior. This paper found that there were four components to sensation seeking: thrill; social; visual; and antisocial.

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The public source identifies “Sensation Seeking Scale” as psychological instrument for measuring sensation seeking. This brief keeps that definition visible, then builds a research path around Sensation, Seeking and Scale.

Editorial reviewA practical starting point whose main value is the path it opens into stronger specialist and primary sources. The current lead gives the account dated anchors—1964, 1978—that can be checked directly. The linked authority record independently contributes the date 1964. Its value is orientation rather than verdict, with Sensation, Seeking and Scale providing the first useful test.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated May 30, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q16875710. None of the 1 selected statements returned an explicit reference. The first chronological checks are 1964 and 1978.

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This entry incorporates text from “Sensation Seeking Scale” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.