Interest, Personality, and Individual Differences
Many personality traits connect to interest, intrinsic motivation, and exploration. This chapter critically reviews research on individual differences related to interest. One class of models (associated with researchers such as Spielberger, Naylor, Kashdan, Maw, and Litman) examines trait curiosity — the stable tendency to be more or less curious. Other models propose individual differences in the breadth versus depth of interests and in boredom proneness. Sensation seeking (associated with Zuckerman) and openness to experience (associated with McCrae and Costa), the two most widely-studied traits related to interest, receive extensive attention. The chapter concludes by identifying the most promising models and by highlighting the limitations of self-report measures of individual differences.
Keywords: traits, sensation seeking, openness to experience, trait curiosity, boredom proneness, breadth of interest
Oxford Scholarship Online requires a subscription or purchase to access the full text of books within the service. Public users can however freely search the site and view the abstracts and keywords for each book and chapter.
Please, subscribe or login to access full text content.
If you think you should have access to this title, please contact your librarian.
To troubleshoot, please check our FAQs , and if you can't find the answer there, please contact us .