# Unraveling the Intricacies of Curiosity: A Comprehensive Study of Its Measures in the Chinese Context

## TL;DR

This study translates and validates curiosity scales in Chinese, showing they work well and exploring how personality traits and social factors relate to curiosity.

## Contribution

Provides validated Chinese versions of curiosity scales and reveals new insights into the psychological and social mechanisms of curiosity.

## Key findings

- Translated curiosity scales in Chinese show comparable reliability and validity to original versions.
- Personality traits like openness and impulsive sensation seeking predict trait curiosity.
- Loneliness partially mediates the link between social anxiety and social curiosity.

## Abstract

Curiosity, as the strong desire to acquire new information, plays a crucial role in human behaviors. While recent research has delved into the effects, behavioral manifestations, and neural underpinnings of curiosity, the absence of standardized assessment tools for measuring curiosity may hinder advancements in this field. Here, we translated different curiosity scales into Chinese and tested each translated scale by examining its reliability and structural validity. Our results showed that the scores derived from these scales have comparable reliability to those original versions. The confirmatory factor analysis results of the curiosity scales were consistent with previous results. We also found significant associations between different types of curiosity within taxonomy and demonstrated that personality traits such as impulsive sensation seeking, intolerance of uncertainty, and openness can jointly predict trait curiosity. Additionally, we confirmed the social dimension of curiosity, showing that loneliness partially mediates the relationship between social anxiety and social curiosity. This study provides validated Chinese versions of curiosity scales and elucidates the mechanisms of curiosity from multiple perspectives, potentially advancing curiosity research in the Chinese and cross‐cultural contexts.