How Adventurous Are You?

Are you excited by clearance sales, white-water rafting and illicit romance? Or perhaps you take a more cautious approach to life, opting for the same vacation each year and skipping dessert after a big meal.

The human tendency to seek out new and different experiences or resist them altogether has captured the interest of of the scientific community, as explained in “What’s New? Exuberance for Novelty Has Benefits,” the Findings column by John Tierney in today’s Science Times.

 Do you make decisions quickly based on incomplete information? Do you lose your temper quickly? Are you easily bored? Do you thrive in conditions that seem chaotic to others, or do you like everything well organized? 

Those are the kinds of questions used to measure novelty-seeking, a personality trait long associated with trouble. As researchers analyzed its genetic roots and relations to the brain’s dopamine system, they linked this trait with problems like attention deficit disorder, compulsive spending and gambling, alcoholism, drug abuse and criminal behavior.

Now, though, after extensively tracking novelty-seekers, researchers are seeing the upside. In the right combination with other traits, it’s a crucial predictor of well-being.

“Novelty-seeking is one of the traits that keeps you healthy and happy and fosters personality growth as you age,” says C. Robert Cloninger, the psychiatrist who developed personality tests for measuring this trait. The problems with novelty-seeking showed up in his early research in the 1990s; the advantages have become apparent after he and his colleagues tested and tracked thousands of people in the United States, Israel and Finland.

“It can lead to antisocial behavior,” he says, “but if you combine this adventurousness and curiosity with persistence and a sense that it’s not all about you, then you get the kind of creativity that benefits society as a whole.”

Fans of this trait are calling it “neophilia” and pointing to genetic evidence of its importance as humans migrated throughout the world. In her survey of the recent research,

Where do you fall on the spectrum? To find out, take the quiz, from Winifred Gallagher, author of the book, “New: Understanding Our Need for Novelty and Change,”. Be sure to answer all the questions to reveal a “submit” button and your score.