Introduction Curiosity is one of the major driving forces that compels people to learn and explore. The desire to relieve the anxiety of curiosity serves as an incentive, which is believed to cause people to search for answers. This can be beneficial but is also potentially dangerous in certain situations. According to Kang, Krajbich, McClure and Wang (2009), curiosity can also be beneficial as...

Curiosity is an emotional motivation that drives knowledge acquisition in learning context. Studies have shown that curiosity positively influences social learning and a peer learner’s curiosity may elicit the curiosity of other learners. Hence, modeling curiosity in learning companions may improve human learners’ learning experience in virtual environments. However, curiosity has not been expl...

To evaluate Litman and Jimerson's (2004) Interest/Deprivation (I/D) model of curiosity, 355 students (269 women, 86 men) responded to 6 trait curiosity measures including the Curiosity/Interest in the World scale (C/IW; Peterson & Seligman, 2004), the Curiosity and Exploration Inventory (CEI; Kashdan, Rose, & Fincham, 2004), the Perceptual Curiosity scale (PC; Collins, Litman, & Spielberger, 20...

Curiosity refers to the desire for acquiring new information. The aim of this study was to develop a questionnaire to assess social curiosity, that is, interest in how other people think, feel, and behave. The questionnaire was administered to 312 participants. Factor analyses of the 10item Social Curiosity Scale (SCS) yielded 2 factors: General Social Curiosity and Covert Social Curiosity. Evi...

Curiosity refers to the desire for acquiring new information. The aim of this study was to develop a questionnaire to assess social curiosity, that is, interest in how other people think, feel, and behave. The questionnaire was administered to 312 participants. Factor analyses of the 10-item Social Curiosity Scale (SCS) yielded 2 factors: General Social Curiosity and Covert Social Curiosity. Ev...

Curiosity has a tumultuous past. Originally curiosity was considered a vice of excess leading to misconduct and disaster. Recently, curiosity has transformed into a virtue of self-expression resulting in success and better performance. In classrooms, educators try to find ways of eliciting curiosity from their students: allowing them to pick their own research topics and books, including pop cu...