[Sensation seeking--critical review of personality psychological concepts and its application]

The term "sensation seeking" is part of a self-contained theory on personality 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 order to find new and diversified stimuli. In their work, researchers mainly refer to Zuckerman's Sensation Seeking Scale in its fifth version (SSS-V), which distinguishes between four aspects of sensation seeking based on factor analysis of the 40 SSS-V-items. There is partly an overlapping of the phenomenon with impulsiveness and extraversion. Whereas application studies show inter alia links between sensation seeking and dangerous driving or dangerous sexual practices, data on the expression of this trait in addictive persons do not point to definitely consistent links. In forensic terms, there is on a link between "boredom susceptibility"--the inability to stand uneventful, monotonous situations--and "disinhibition"--a lack of control of impulses--figuring as subscales of the SSS-V, on the one hand, and hyperkinetic attention deficit syndromes and "disactualisation weakness", as described by Janzarik, on the other. At present, there is no German-language SSS-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 Western Europe.