Sensation Seeking Scale
psychological instrument for measuring sensation seeking

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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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.