The nature and measurement of sensory curiosity

Abstract

To determine if sensory curiosity (SC) could be identified as a meaningful psychological construct, a pool of SC items was administered to 552 undergraduate students (402 women, 150 men), along with measures of perceptual and epistemic curiosity. Participants also responded to the trait anxiety, anger, and curiosity scales of the State-Trait Personality Inventory (STPI), and subscales of the Sensation Seeking Scale (SSS). Factor analyses of the SC items identified one strong factor, from which 10 items were selected to form a SC scale. Positive correlations of the SC scale with the other curiosity scales that were stronger than the correlations of the SSS subscales with these measures, provided evidence of convergent and discriminant validity for the SC scale. Divergent validity was evidenced by essentially zero correlations of the SC scale with the STPI anxiety, anger and depression measures.