![]() The researchers ask: Is the experience of curiosity more likely to be positive when we anticipate that our curiosity will be satisfied sooner rather than later? The paper by Noordewier and van Dijk does just this for the dimension of time. Once we recognize that curiosity has many faces - not all of them equally pleasurable - we can consider what affects the nature of our experience in a given case. These two flavors reflect the changing balance of "wanting" (what we need) versus "liking" (what we enjoy). On one view, curiosity comes in two flavors: deprivation - a strong but unsatisfied need to know - and interest - information-seeking that's motivated by anticipated pleasure. Other accounts of curiosity build in a distinction between its more negative and positive faces. Perhaps the bigger or more consequential the gap, the more aversive the feeling. Like hunger or thirst, curiosity can thus be aversive an emotional prod to obtain information. The gap induces a feeling of deficiency, which in turn motivates her to fill the gap. One of the most prominent theories of curiosity, the information-gap model, suggests that curiosity arises when a person notices a gap in her knowledge. If you're curious to hear more, consider first what some theories of curiosity tell us about curiosity itself. ![]() A paper by Marret Noordewier and Eric van Dijk, published in May in the journal Cognition and Emotion, reveals one of the factors that affects the balance of negative and positive when it comes curiosity. Psychologists have been curious about this question, and their curiosity is starting to pay off. So what accounts for this variation? Do some situations elicit more pleasurable forms of curiosity than others? Curiosity can be more or less pleasurable, more or less aggravating. Of course, not all feelings of curiosity are the same. Curiosity is all about learning what we do not (yet) know. Like lust, curiosity has positive and negative faces: one pointed (with happy anticipation!) towards what we desire, one pointed (with cruel frustration!) towards what we have not yet obtained - and may never obtain.īut unlike lust, the object of curiosity's desire is information. Just ask yourself: Is curiosity a positive feeling or a negative feeling? Is it more like frustration or more like anticipation? Is it a painful reminder of what we don't (yet) know, or a thrilling beacon towards what we might soon discover?Īctually, curiosity can be all of these things - and more. Curiosity is a familiar feeling among people.īut as soon as we scrutinize that feeling, curiosity reveals itself to be a complex emotion indeed.
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