Sensation seeking - A review of the theory and its applications

The term "sensation seeking" is part of a self-contained theory on personal ity psychology. It is meant to denote a disposition - peculiar to a certain personality, probably genetically founded and correlating with biological, f. e. neuroendocrine measures - to explore one's social environment in ord er to find new and diversified stimuli. In their work, researchers mainly r efer to Zuckerman's Sensation Seeking Scale in its fifth version (SSS-V), w hich distinguishes between four aspects of sensation seeking based on facto r analysis of the 40 SSS-V-items. There is partly an overlapping of the phe nomenon with impulsiveness and extraversion. Whereas application studies sh ow inter alia links between sensation seeking and dangerous driving or dang erous sexual practices, data on the expression of this trait in addictive p ersons do not point to definitely consistent links. In forensic terms, ther e is on a link between "boredom susceptibility" - the inability to stand un eventful, monotonous situations - and "disinhibition" - a lack of control o f impulses - figuring as subscales of the SSS-V on the one hand, and hyperk inetic attention deficit syndromes and "disactualisation weakness", as desc ribed by Janzarik, on the other. At present, there is no German-language SS S-inventory in line with basal testing theory requirements. Because of the apparently different modi of sensation seeking influenced by other cultural traditions, such a scale must be basically adapted to the life-style in We stern Europe.