Sensation Seeking Scale

The Sensation Seeking Scale is one of the most common psychological instrument 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.

The first Sensation Seeking Scale (SSS) was created by Martin 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. Form III was the introduction of an experimental form with 113 items on it. In 1971, the scale was further revised to From IV and the sensation seeking components were revised with it to include: thrill, experience, disinhibition and boredom susceptibility. This scale also had some reliability issues and the scoring and so in 1978 it was revised one more time to the current Form V. In 1993 a new scale was developed for children. The scale slightly changed the factors to thrill and adventure seeking, drug and alcohol attitudes and social disinhibition.

Items from the Sensation Seeking Scale include:

In the late 1950s, Zuckerman and colleagues conducted a study using a sensory deprivation isolation chamber and recorded participants reactions. Reactions ranged from anxiety, boredom, hallucinations and cognitive inefficiency. A standardized test was sought out to help predict these reactions, but at the time there was no such test. They began to construct their own scale and began with the optimal level of stimulation and optimal level of arousal theories as the bases of the scale. These two theories can be traced back to Wilhelm Wundt and Sigmund Freud. They opt to put items into a forced-choice form to avoid responses that were socially desirable and with that the first sensation seeking scale was formed, SSS General Scale. Since then revisions have been made to the original scale.

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