In search of the arousal procrastinator: Investigating the relation between procrastination, arousal-based personality traits and beliefs about procrastination motivations

Arousal procrastination was investigated to determine: (a) If the General Procrastination Scale (GP; Lay, 1986) measures procrastination motivated by arousal, and (b) whether sensation seeking (SS), extraversion (E), and the reducer index (R) account for variance in beliefs about the motivation for academic procrastination. Participants were 311 undergraduate students (60.1% female), primarily Caucasian (63.3%), with a mean age of 20.09 (SD = 3.08). An online questionnaire package included measures of procrastination and 3 arousal-based personality inventories. A factor analysis of the GP and the Sensation Seeking Scale-V (SSS-V; Zuckerman, Eysenck, & Eysenck, 1978) produced six factors with the GP and SSS-V items loading on separate factors, indicating no relation. A regression analysis revealed that SS, E, and R together accounted for 5.2% of the variance in participants’ arousal-related beliefs motivating their procrastination. These results challenge the existing literature claiming that the GP is a measure of arousal procrastination, but do indicate that some individuals believe that their procrastination is motivated by a need for heightened arousal.