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People with high sensation seeking personalities
don't just crave high sensation seeking environments.
They thrive in them.
In those moments, the high sensation seeking person is in their element and they can
function very well in an environment where a low sensation seeking person might crumble.
Researchers from all around the world have administered,
compiled, and examined versions of the sensation seeking scale.
Because of this, we have a pretty good idea of
the variation of sensation seeking over time and for groups of individuals.
For example, scores on each of the components of
sensation seeking increases with age to a point.
Sensation seeking scores are higher in children
and then they continue to increase until the late teens.
And they finally start to decrease as individuals get older.
There is one exception, boredom susceptibility.
For most people, boredom susceptibility remains relatively stable throughout life.
That means if you get bored easily when you're younger,
it's likely you'll get bored easily when you're older.
In terms of differences between males and females,
the story is a little bit more complex than you might imagine.
In general, males have higher scores than
females in three of the four parts of sensation seeking.
Men tend to score higher on thrill adventure seeking,
boredom susceptibility, and disinhibition.
Women outscore men only inexperienced seeking.
This might explain why people like
the Russian Spiderman and those starring in
YouTube videos hurling themselves from houses,
tend not to be women in their early 50s.
They tend to be more often than
not males in the prime of their testosterone producing years.
The gap between men and women for
sensation seeking may not be there for long. It's closing.
The last few years have seen a steady increase for
scores of women in thrilling adventure seeking.
You can see this reflected in more women participating in extreme sports for example.
While I don't believe that high sensation seeking as
a whole is an outcome of changes in society,
I do think that this part of the puzzle probably is.
It seems as though we are seeing
a cultural shift in thrill and adventure seeking in many countries.
There were activities previously off limits were discouraged in women, not so anymore.
And this may encourage some women to follow their thrill and adventure seeking
desires and impulses and actually do what comes naturally to them,
the same wild stuff that high sensation seeking men do.
So now you know a little bit more about how sensation seeking
changes over time and how it might be different for men and for women.
But sensation seekers can be very different from one another.
In the next lesson,
we'll look at some of the variations in sensation seeking and some things that
might look like sensation seeking or are actually something different.
Kenneth CarterProfessor of Psychology
