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This dissertation contributes to a better understanding of curiosity resolution. I investigate the premise that the experience of curiosity resolution is influenced both by the fact that curiosity is resolved, as well as how it is resolved. While the outcome associated with curiosity resolution can be positive or negative in nature, the experience of curiosity resolution itself is predicted to be pleasant in nature. Therefore, I propose that the degree to which each of these two resolution facets is salient will influence curiosity-related evaluations. In this dissertation, I investigate pre-resolution expectations as well as post-resolution downstream consequences. Prior to curiosity resolution, I propose that individuals are likely to be focused on the outcome they will obtain. However, when faced with uncertain outcomes, individuals strategically heighten anticipated feelings of disappointment in order to protect against actual disappointment when the outcome is revealed; thus, I predict and demonstrate in four studies that curious consumers will display heightened levels of pre-resolution feelings of anticipated disappointment. After curiosity resolution, I propose that individuals experience not only positive or negative feelings associated with the outcome obtained, but also positive feelings of resolution itself. In four studies, I investigate the power of curiosity resolution to buffer negative responses to relatively undesirable outcomes. Importantly, I also demonstrate that consumers' focus on either the outcome obtained or on the experience of resolution itself can be experimentally shifted, thereby mitigating the previously described effects. / Ph. D.

Mitt examensarbete är en video på drygt sex minuter. Videon är animerad i Adobe After Effects. Den har för avsikt att på ett informativt, enkelt och snyggt sätt förklara NASAs Curiosity-uppdrag på Mars, samt summera planetens roll i popkultur genom tiderna. Målgruppen är människor som hellre får information via internet än via papperstidningar, och som gärna vill få en övergripande bild av olika fenomen (i det här fallet Mars och Curiosity). Den är utformad med mobilt tittande i åtanke, vilket också speglas i målgruppsanpassningen. Denna reflektionsrapport är ett komplement till videon, och här har jag för avsikt att berätta om hur (och varför) jag gjort videon. Den kommer även diskutera fenomenet explainer-journalistik. Vad är explainer-journalistik, och varför är det ett viktigt fenomen att förstå för samtida och framtida journalister?

This investigation was concerned with the problem of determining the value of selected curiosity tests for predicting academic achievement in first and second-grades.

This study has five chapters, organized in the following manner: (1) Chapter I contains the introduction, statement of the problem, purpose of the study, questions, significance of the study, and definition of terms; (2) Chapter II is a review of the literature; (3) Chapter III is a description of subjects and tests and procedures for treating the data; (4) Chapter IV contains the statistical technique of the analysis and the findings related to the questions, and (5) Chapter V consists of the summary, findings, conclusions, and recommendations. The problem of the study was to explore the relationship between curiosity and print awareness among four-year-old children. Subjects participating in the study were 71 four-year-old children from six licensed child care and preschool settings located in different geographical sections of a north central Texas city. The study included thirty-four girls and thirty-seven boys. Instruments used to collect the data were Kreitler, Zigler, and Kreitler's battery of curiosity tasks and Goodman's Signs of the Environment and Book Handling Knowledge tasks. Canonical I correlation analyses do not yield a significant relationship between variables of curiosity and print awareness. An alternate Pearson Product Moment correlation yielded some specific pairwise correlations between certain curiosity variables and print awareness. Results, although not statistically significant, were used as trend indicators to identify areas worthy of further investigation. On the basis of the findings, it was concluded that the possibility of a degree of correlation between specific curiosity variables and levels of print awareness suggests the need for further research in this area. In the print awareness tasks, it was concluded that the more context available to children the greater their ability to respond appropriately to print. Knowledge of print in the environment was more advanced than knowledge of print in books for some of the children in the study.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Committee on Social Thought, Jun. 2003. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 187-196). Also available on the Internet.

This study investigated the development of curiosity in young children. A previous study by Kreitler, Zigler, and Kreitler had identified five specific types of curiosity, manipulatory curiosity, perceptual curiosity, conceptual curiosity, curiosity about the complex, and adjustive-reactive curiosity. The basic problem was to describe the development of these five types of curiosity in three-, four-, and five-year-old children. A secondary problem was to determine if children follow a predictable pattern in their development of the five types of curiosity. Five tasks, measuring nineteen variables of curiosity, were administered individually to thirty three-year-olds, thirty four-year-olds, and thirty five-year-olds by a trained rater. Mean scores for each variable and each type of curiosity were calculated for each group.

This thesis argues that the concepts of curiosity and the marvellous resurface at different moments in cultural history, most notably in periods of transition and epistemological uncertainty. The sixteenth- and seventeenth-century ‘culture of curiosity,’ which is characterised by the amateur collector’s engagement with rare and boundary-crossing objects in the process of assembling a cabinet of curiosities, presents a rich contextual foil against which to place the practice of the Surrealists and of some contemporary artists and curators; it has profound resonances for the relationship between modernism and postmodernism, and between art and science. Within modernism, the Surrealists initiated a large-scale, fundamental probing of the principles underlying rationalist thought, and of the categories and hierarchies of academic art and bourgeois taste, which had dominated Western culture since the Enlightenment; and within postmodernism, artists and curators who revert to practices of collecting and appropriate protocols of the natural sciences question institutional frameworks of knowledge production, identity formation and meaning making through material artefacts. In both instances, curiosity and the marvellous – and the related themes of classification and dilettantism – have emerged as especially effective and resonant means of reading dominant culture against the grain. More specifically, this thesis contends that the Surrealist marvellous is rooted in the early modern discourse of the marvellous and monstrous which was characterised by ‘paradoxes of classification.’ This is particularly evident in the Surrealists’ engagement with objects testifying to the natural marvellous and the natural fantastic: stones, coral and insects, among other things and creatures, carry distinctly subversive implications of obscuration, entanglement and excess, metamorphosis and mimicry, and deviation and transgression, straddling the boundaries between art and nature, and art and representation. Furthermore, contemporary artistic and curatorial practice drawing on the ‘age of the marvellous’ – which, in this perspective, extends to Surrealism, with the potential to recur at any time thereafter – is primarily concerned with overcoming ‘white cube’ and Beaux-Arts-Museum historicity, aesthetics and display rationales by reintroducing subjectivity, doubt and digression into the context of the museum and the sciences. In this regard, scepticism towards intellectual certainties and accomplished systems of classification leads to an informed recourse to moments in history when the meanings of objects were being constantly negotiated rather than set in stone.

The major purpose of the research was to determine whether the curiosity levels of children would be increased and whether gains would be made in children's reading comprehension when selected questioning procedures were used. The study was confined to teacher-directed instructional situations where children were engaged in reading acts. More specifically, answers were sought to the following questions: 1. Does the use of selected questioning procedures produce a significant increase in curiosity over the use of regular classroom procedures? 2. Does the use of selected questioning procedures produce a significant gain in reading comprehension over the use of regular classroom procedures?

Compassion requires both attention and motivation to engage with another person’s experience. Two studies examined whether curiosity—the interest and motivation to explore new or complex information—promotes empathic concern and suppresses personal distress. These studies also examined whether attachment insecurity moderates curiosity’s effect on empathy. Study 1 identified correlations among curiosity, attachment security, empathic concern, and personal distress traits. In Study 2, participants were primed with high or low curiosity before watching a video of a peer experiencing hardship, then reported state curiosity, empathic concern, personal distress, and prosocial motivation. Trait and state curiosity predicted greater empathic concern and prosocial motivation. In Study 1, greater attachment anxiety was shown to weaken trait curiosity’s relationship with empathic concern. In Study 2, greater attachment anxiety also weakened the relationship between state curiosity and personal distress. These results suggest curiosity may be a way to promote compassion and willingness to help.