Sensation Seeking Adjective Markers (SSAM): development and validation of a new sensation seeking measure

Sensation seeking is the pursuit of varied, novel, and complex experiences and has been the subject of many studies since the 1950s. Research has demonstrated sensation seeking traits are related to risk-taking, including use and abuse of substances as well as physical risk-taking such as participation in extreme sports. Researchers have developed multiple measures to assess individual differences in sensation seeking. The most used measures for adults have weaknesses, such as conflating traits with behaviors, using out-of-date language, and low internal consistency. In the present research we carried out a series of studies in which we developed and validated a brief measure of sensation. The final version of the measure contained seven adjectives that participants rated how accurately each described them. The results showed that scores on the new measure were positively related to scores on two popular measures of sensation-seeking (i.e., the SSS-V and the AISS) as well as to two measures of risk-taking (i.e., DOSPERT and YRBS).