SSS-V: Sensation Seeking Scale-Form V

Reviewed by: Constantin Rezlescu | Associate Professor | UCL Psychology

At a Glance

Items	40, grouped into four subscales of 10 items each (Thrill and Adventure Seeking, Experience Seeking, Disinhibition, Boredom Susceptibility)
Administration time	About 10 to 15 minutes
Response format	Forced choice; each item presents two statements (A or B) and the respondent selects the one that better describes their preferences or feelings
Scores	Four subscale scores (0-10 each) plus a total score (0-40), formed by summing the four subscales
Validated ages	16 and older (development samples spanned ages 16 to 70)
License	Freely available for research use with attribution; no commercial licensor gates the instrument
Original citation	Zuckerman, Eysenck, & Eysenck (1978), Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology

Introduction

The Sensation Seeking Scale, Form V (SSS-V) is a widely used measure of individual differences in the tendency to seek varied, novel, complex, and intense sensations and experiences, and the willingness to take physical, social, legal, and financial risks for their sake. It was developed by Marvin Zuckerman with Sybil B. G. Eysenck and Hans J. Eysenck (Zuckerman, Eysenck, & Eysenck, 1978), who derived Form V from earlier versions of the scale through cross-cultural factor analysis of English and American samples.

Form V refined the item content and subscale structure of the previous forms and settled on four replicable dimensions that are summed into a single total score. It has since become a standard operationalization of sensation seeking in personality and risk-behavior research (Zuckerman, Eysenck, & Eysenck, 1978).

Understanding Sensation Seeking

Sensation seeking is conceived as a broad personality trait defined by the pursuit of experiences that are varied, novel, complex, and intense, together with the willingness to accept risk in order to obtain them. Zuckerman’s model treats the trait as having a substantial biological basis.

Biological foundations:

• Heritability: biometric twin studies yielded a broad-trait heritability of .58 (Fulker, Eysenck, & Zuckerman, 1980, as reported in Zuckerman & Kuhlman, 2000), replicated at 59% in twins reared apart (Hur & Bouchard, 1997, via Zuckerman & Kuhlman, 2000)
• MAO activity: significant negative correlations between platelet monoamine oxidase (MAO-B) and sensation seeking appeared in 9 of 13 studies; MAO is lowest in adolescence and rises with age, mirroring the age decline in the trait (Zuckerman & Kuhlman, 2000)
• Hormonal correlates: high-Disinhibition males show higher androgen and estrogen concentrations, and sensation-seeking scores correlate positively with testosterone (Roberti, 2004)
• Dopaminergic reactivity: high sensation seekers show upregulated dopaminergic activity on exposure to novel or stressful stimuli (Roberti, 2004)

Developmental trajectory:

• The highest total-score means occur in the youngest measured group, with a clear, roughly linear decline through adulthood (Zuckerman, Eysenck, & Eysenck, 1978)
• A childhood and adolescent rise to a young-adult peak is commonly hypothesized but was not itself demonstrated in the Form V development study, which sampled ages 16 and older (Zuckerman, Eysenck, & Eysenck, 1978)
• The decline is steepest for Thrill and Adventure Seeking and Disinhibition and shallowest for Boredom Susceptibility (Zuckerman, Eysenck, & Eysenck, 1978; Roberti, 2004)

Theoretical Foundation

The SSS-V is grounded in Zuckerman’s biological theory of sensation seeking, which holds that the trait reflects inherited differences in optimal levels of stimulation and arousal, expressed through neurotransmitter systems that regulate approach behavior and sensitivity to reward. High sensation seekers are theorized to seek out stimulating environments to maintain a preferred arousal level, whereas low sensation seekers prefer more predictable, less intense experience.

Four-dimensional structure. Form V measures sensation seeking through four distinct but correlated subscales:

Thrill and Adventure Seeking (TAS) reflects the desire for physical risk-taking through activities involving speed, danger, and adventure. It shows the strongest decline with age and prominent sex differences.

Experience Seeking (ES) captures the pursuit of novelty through the mind and senses, including unconventional lifestyle choices, travel, art, music, and nonconforming companions. It relates most strongly to openness to experience.

Disinhibition (Dis) measures the tendency toward social stimulation through parties, social drinking, sexual variety, and gambling. It shows the largest sex difference and strong associations with substance use and antisocial behavior.

Boredom Susceptibility (BS) reflects intolerance for repetition, routine, and predictable environments. It is the least age-sensitive of the four dimensions and the weakest psychometrically.

🎯 Key insight: The SSS-V’s enduring value is predictive rather than diagnostic. Its total score is a reliable index that forecasts a broad range of real-world risk behaviors, but its four subscales replicate unevenly and it carries no published cutoffs, so scores are best read relative to a comparable sample.

Key Features

Assessment Characteristics

• 40 forced-choice items, each presenting a paired A/B choice
• Four subscales of 10 items each (TAS, ES, Dis, BS), summed into a total score
• About 10 to 15 minutes to complete; used with respondents aged 16 and older
• Forced-choice format, intended to reduce (though not eliminate) social-desirability responding
• Freely available for research use with attribution

Dimensions Assessed

• Thrill and Adventure Seeking (TAS) – physical risk-taking through speed, danger, and outdoor adventure
• Experience Seeking (ES) – novelty through the mind and senses, unconventional lifestyle, travel, art, and unusual people
• Disinhibition (Dis) – social stimulation through parties, drinking, sexual variety, and uninhibited behavior
• Boredom Susceptibility (BS) – intolerance of routine, repetition, and predictable environments

Versions & Adaptations

• Earlier forms: the SSS-V descends from Forms I through IV, developed by Zuckerman and colleagues from 1964 onward; Form V refined the item content and settled the four-subscale structure through cross-cultural factor analysis (Zuckerman, Eysenck, & Eysenck, 1978)
• Form V-Revised (SSS-V-R): a revised Form V is described in Zuckerman’s later monograph (Zuckerman, 1994)
• Later measures: Zuckerman subsequently folded sensation seeking into the Impulsive Sensation Seeking scale of the Zuckerman-Kuhlman Personality Questionnaire; the Brief Sensation Seeking Scale is a widely used short form. These are separate instruments rather than editions of Form V.
• Numerous translations exist; cross-national factor equivalence is strongest within English-speaking samples and weaker for translated forms (Zuckerman, Eysenck, & Eysenck, 1978)

Research Applications

• Risk-behavior research – predicting substance use, dangerous driving, risky sexual behavior, and extreme-sport participation
• Substance-use research – examining vulnerability factors, prevention targets, and treatment matching
• Personality and behavioral genetics – investigating biological bases, trait correlates, and heritability
• Developmental and cross-cultural research – tracking the age decline of the trait and testing whether the four-factor structure travels across samples

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Assess your sensation seeking profile across the four dimensions of risk-taking and novelty seeking.

Scoring and Interpretation

Response Format

For each item, respondents choose between two statements (A or B), selecting the one that better describes their preferences or feelings. One statement in each pair is keyed as the sensation-seeking response.

Illustrative Items

The following item pairs illustrate three of the four subscales; the sensation-seeking (keyed) statement in each pair is reproduced from the original Form V item table (Zuckerman, Eysenck, & Eysenck, 1978, Table 2).

Thrill and Adventure Seeking (TAS):

• A) “I would like to try parachute jumping”
• B) “I would never want to try jumping out of a plane, with or without a parachute”

Disinhibition (Dis):

• A) “I like wild, uninhibited parties”
• B) “I prefer quiet parties with good conversation”

Boredom Susceptibility (BS):

• A) “I get bored seeing the same old faces”
• B) “I like the comfortable familiarity of everyday friends”

An Experience Seeking pair is omitted deliberately: the original development paper prints only the keyed choice for each item, so a correct A/B dyad for this subscale cannot be reconstructed without the full item key.

Scoring Procedure

1. Score 1 point for each keyed sensation-seeking response, following the scoring key.
2. Calculate subscale scores by summing the 10 items for each dimension (range 0-10 per subscale).
3. Calculate the total score by summing the four subscales (range 0-40). Form V contains no separate general scale; the total is the balanced sum of the four factors (Zuckerman, Eysenck, & Eysenck, 1978).
4. Higher scores indicate greater sensation seeking.

Score Interpretation

No published cutoffs or normative bands exist for the SSS-V total score. Scores should be interpreted relative to a comparable reference sample rather than against fixed thresholds, and subscale profiles are often more informative than the total alone.

Population Norms

No authoritative universal norm table exists for the SSS-V total score, so scores are best interpreted relative to a comparable sample. The most complete published reference means come from the original Form V development study, which reported age- and sex-stratified totals for an English community sample (drawn from the Maudsley Twin Register) and a comparison United States college sample. These are sample-specific descriptive values, not standardized norms.

English sample: mean SSS-V total score by age and sex (Zuckerman, Eysenck, & Eysenck, 1978, Table 6):

Age group	Males (total M)	Females (total M)	Source
16-19	21.5	16.6	Zuckerman et al. (1978)
20-29	19.3	15.4	Zuckerman et al. (1978)
30-39	18.4	12.3	Zuckerman et al. (1978)
40-49	15.8	10.7	Zuckerman et al. (1978)
50-59	—	8.5	Zuckerman et al. (1978)
60+	12.4	7.0	Zuckerman et al. (1978)

United States college comparison, ages 16-19 (Zuckerman, Eysenck, & Eysenck, 1978, Table 5):

Sample	Total M	SD	Source
U.S. college males (16-19)	21.6	5.7	Zuckerman et al. (1978)
U.S. college females (16-19)	19.6	6.6	Zuckerman et al. (1978)

• Age decline: total scores decrease approximately linearly with age; the decline is steepest for Thrill and Adventure Seeking and Disinhibition and shallowest for Boredom Susceptibility (Zuckerman, Eysenck, & Eysenck, 1978)
• Sex differences: males scored higher than females on the total score and on the TAS and Disinhibition subscales, with Disinhibition showing the largest difference. The total-score gap was roughly 5 points in the English 16-19 group and about 2 points in the younger U.S. sample, so the magnitude is sample-dependent (Zuckerman, Eysenck, & Eysenck, 1978)

Research Evidence and Psychometric Properties

Reliability Evidence

• Internal consistency (total): total-score reliability was .83 to .86 across the Form V samples (English males .83, females .86; American males .84, females .85; Zuckerman, Eysenck, & Eysenck, 1978, Table 3)
• Subscale reliability: subscale reliabilities range from about .56 to .82 across the English and American samples (TAS .77-.82, ES .61-.67, Dis .74-.78, BS .56-.65), lowest for Boredom Susceptibility (Zuckerman, Eysenck, & Eysenck, 1978, Table 3)
• Long-term stability: moderate rank-order stability over long intervals, reflecting both trait consistency and the expected developmental decline with age; no published long-interval retest coefficient is reproduced here

Factor Structure and Validity

• Four-factor structure: three of the four factors (TAS, ES, Dis) showed good cross-national and cross-sex factor reliability; Boredom Susceptibility was the weakest and showed no correspondence between the American male and female samples (Zuckerman, Eysenck, & Eysenck, 1978, Table 1)
• Hierarchical structure: the total score is the summation of the four factor scores; Form V itself contains no separate general scale (Zuckerman, Eysenck, & Eysenck, 1978)
• Replication and its limits: the four-factor structure has been replicated in U.S., British, Australian, French, and Canadian samples, but a reliability-generalization study reported marginal subscale reliabilities, especially in younger samples (Roberti, 2004)
• Convergent validity (openness): the SSS-V total score correlated r = .45 with NEO-PI-R Openness to Experience, the Experience Seeking subscale correlated r = .43 with Openness, and Agreeableness correlated r = .40 with Disinhibition (Roberti, 2004, citing Costa & McCrae and Zuckerman et al., 1993)
• Discriminant validity (anxiety): sensation seeking predicts risky behavior largely independently of anxiety and neuroticism; substance use in particular shows “practically no correlation with anxiety or neuroticism” (Zuckerman & Kuhlman, 2000)

Behavioral Prediction

• Substance use: sensation seeking is consistently associated with licit and illicit drug use, and peer sensation-seeking levels predict individual use (Roberti, 2004)
• Extreme sports: participants in high-impact sports (rock climbing, scuba diving, sky diving, parachuting) generally show elevated total and Thrill and Adventure Seeking scores (Roberti, 2004)
• Antisocial behavior: thrill seeking has been linked to property delinquency in adolescents, consistent with the trait’s broader association with rule-breaking behavior (Roberti, 2004)
• Independence from anxiety: across risk domains, sensation seeking rather than anxiety or neuroticism carries the predictive weight (Zuckerman & Kuhlman, 2000)

Biological Research

• Heritability: a broad-trait heritability of .58 (Fulker, Eysenck, & Zuckerman, 1980, as reported in Zuckerman & Kuhlman, 2000), replicated at 59% in twins reared apart (Hur & Bouchard, 1997, via Zuckerman & Kuhlman, 2000)
• Dopamine genetics: the first reported gene-personality association was between the D4 dopamine receptor (D4DR) exon III and “novelty seeking,” which correlates r = .68 with Impulsive Sensation Seeking (Zuckerman & Kuhlman, 2000)
• MAO activity: significant negative correlations between platelet MAO-B and sensation seeking appeared in 9 of 13 studies; MAO is lowest in adolescence and rises with age, mirroring the age decline in the trait (Zuckerman & Kuhlman, 2000)
• Hormones: high-Disinhibition males show higher androgen and estrogen concentrations, and sensation-seeking scores correlate positively with testosterone (Roberti, 2004)

Developmental and Cross-Cultural Research

• Age effects: a clear linear decline in the total score with age; in a regression, age accounted for 21% of the variance in TAS, 18% in Disinhibition, 5% in Experience Seeking, and 3% in Boredom Susceptibility (Zuckerman, Eysenck, & Eysenck, 1978)
• Boredom Susceptibility and age: the age change was non-significant for BS in males, and BS represents a component of sensation seeking that is relatively consistent across age (Zuckerman, Eysenck, & Eysenck, 1978; Roberti, 2004)
• Cross-national equivalence: the general factor correlated .67 between the English and American samples but only .35 between those and a Japanese translation, so factor equivalence is strongest within English-speaking samples and weaker for translated forms (Zuckerman, Eysenck, & Eysenck, 1978)

Usage Guidelines and Applications

Primary Research Applications

• Operationalizing sensation seeking and its four dimensions in individual-differences research
• Predicting real-world risk behaviors such as substance use, dangerous driving, risky sexual behavior, and extreme-sport participation
• Studying the biological bases and heritability of risk-taking
• Examining developmental and cross-cultural patterns in the trait, with appropriate measurement caution

Design Considerations

• Model the age decline in cross-sectional and longitudinal designs; the total score falls steadily across the adult lifespan (Zuckerman, Eysenck, & Eysenck, 1978)
• Account for sex differences in analysis and interpretation, especially on TAS and Disinhibition (Zuckerman, Eysenck, & Eysenck, 1978)
• Prefer subscale and continuous analyses over total-score cutoffs, since no published bands exist and Boredom Susceptibility is the least reliable subscale (Zuckerman, Eysenck, & Eysenck, 1978; Roberti, 2004)
• Obtain adequate samples for subscale-level analysis, given the modest reliabilities of the shorter dimensions

Cultural Considerations

• Factor equivalence is strongest within English-speaking samples and weaker for translated forms (Zuckerman, Eysenck, & Eysenck, 1978); use validated translations for non-English samples
• Some item content reflects mid-1970s Anglo-American norms and may not carry the same meaning across cultures; interpret scores against a culturally comparable reference group

Limitations and Cautions

• Uneven subscale structure: the four-factor model is broadly supported, but Boredom Susceptibility in particular replicates weakly and has low internal consistency (Zuckerman, Eysenck, & Eysenck, 1978; Roberti, 2004)
• No published cutoffs: there are no validated total-score bands or percentile thresholds; scores are interpretable only relative to a comparable sample
• Age and sex dependence: consistent age decline and male-female differences require age- and sex-appropriate comparison groups
• Forced-choice format: the binary format may not capture nuanced preferences, and some social-desirability responding can persist despite it
• Not diagnostic: the SSS-V measures a personality trait, not psychopathology, and is not a clinical decision instrument

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Legal and Copyright Information

Copyright and Usage Responsibility: Check that you have the proper rights and permissions to use this assessment tool in your research. This may include purchasing appropriate licenses, obtaining permissions from authors/copyright holders, or ensuring your usage falls within fair use guidelines.

The SSS-V items have long been printed in journal appendices and in Zuckerman’s books and are treated as freely available for research use with attribution; no commercial licensor gates the instrument. Item content is reproduced here only in brief illustrative form.

Proper Attribution: When using or referencing this scale, cite the original development:

• Zuckerman, M., Eysenck, S. B. G., & Eysenck, H. J. (1978). Sensation seeking in England and America: Cross-cultural, age, and sex comparisons. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 46(1), 139-149. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006x.46.1.139

External Links and Resources

• Sensation Seeking – Wikipedia
• Society for Risk Analysis

References

Primary Development:

• Zuckerman, M., Eysenck, S. B. G., & Eysenck, H. J. (1978). Sensation seeking in England and America: Cross-cultural, age, and sex comparisons. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 46(1), 139-149. https://doi.org/10.1037/0022-006x.46.1.139

Theoretical Foundation:

• Zuckerman, M. (1994). Behavioral expressions and biosocial bases of sensation seeking. New York: Cambridge University Press. (no DOI)

Validation and Review:

• Roberti, J. W. (2004). A review of behavioral and biological correlates of sensation seeking. Journal of Research in Personality, 38(3), 256-279. https://doi.org/10.1016/s0092-6566(03)00067-9
• Zuckerman, M., & Kuhlman, D. M. (2000). Personality and risk-taking: Common biosocial factors. Journal of Personality, 68(6), 999-1029. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-6494.00124

Genetic Research:

• Fulker, D. W., Eysenck, S. B. G., & Zuckerman, M. (1980). A genetic and environmental analysis of sensation seeking. Journal of Research in Personality, 14(2), 261-281. https://doi.org/10.1016/0092-6566(80)90033-1

Related Assessments: Brief Sensation Seeking Scale (BSSS) and the Zuckerman-Kuhlman Personality Questionnaire Impulsive Sensation Seeking scale (links added when their pages go live)