In psychology, novelty seeking (NS) is a personality trait associated with exploratory activity in response to novel stimulation, impulsive decision making, extravagance in approach to reward cues, quick loss of temper, and avoidance of frustration.
It is a multifaceted behavioral construct that includes thrill seeking, novelty preference, risk taking, harm avoidance, and reward dependence.
The novelty-seeking trait is considered a heritable tendency of individuals to take risks for the purpose of achieving stimulation and seeking new environments and situations that make their experiences more intense.
[4] In the revised version of the Temperament and Character Inventory (TCI-R) novelty seeking consists of the following four subscales: A research study[6] found that novelty seeking had inverse relationships with other dimensions of the Temperament and Character Inventory, particularly harm avoidance and to a more moderate extent self-directedness and self-transcendence.
Novelty seeking is positively associated with the five factor model trait of extraversion and to a lesser extent openness to experience and is inversely associated with conscientiousness.
The overall effect of dopamine when exposed to a novel stimulus is a mass release of the neurotransmitter in reward systems of the brain including the mesolimbic pathway.