Money & Happiness Quizzes | Personality Tests

The scale you completed was the Curiosity and Exploration Inventory, developed by Todd B. Kashdan, Paul Rose, and Frank D. Fincham(2004).

The scale measures the degree to which you seek and enjoy novelty and challenge. A higher score on the scale suggests that you are very curious, and a low score means you are less curious than others.
Curiosity consists of two components:

Exploration: striving to experience something new and challenging
Absorption: feeling engaged in the activities you do.

The graph below shows your curiosity with your score (in green) compared to those of of less happy people than average (in red) and more happy people (in blue)

As more people fill out this survey, we expect to see that people who are highly curious are also happier than those who are not.

Why is curiosity good for well-being?
Research suggests that curious people use their resources, such as attention, to pursue experiences through which they can learn new things. If people fully engage in such experiences, they can feel good about developing a new skill or mastering an existing one. Also, in pursuing new experiences, curious feel people may start feeling... even more curious about something new, thus continuing the cycle of exploration. Self-determination theory states that people are happy when they think they are a good at something (when their need for mastery is fulfilled), and learning new things through curious pursuits helps them do that.

How can I increase my curiosity?
Psychoologist Todd Kashdan says "curiosity begets fruther curiosity." In part, this means that we start feeling curious about new things when we are already engaging in a new experience. What you can do is to try something you haven't before (e.g., read a book of a different genre, try a new type of art, go to a new place). When you do that unfamiliar activity, you will provide yourself opportunities to start feeling curious about something new that is related to it. Also, motivate yourself to seek new experiences by thinking that you are approaching something good, as opposed to avoiding something boring. Approach (as opposed) motivation leads to greater emotional rewards from taking a risk to try something new.

Also, your curiosity may be related to how your pursue pleasure, what you value in life, and your personality traits. You might be interested in taking our Hedonism Scale, Schwartz Values Scale, or Big Five Personality Inventory.

Do you have ideas on improving this study? Or did you encounter any difficulties in answering the questions? Click here to send a message to the creators of this study.

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