Curiosity and Meaning of Life Leading towards Personal Growth: The Role of Emotional Intelligence

Our complex society demands varied role requirements in personal and professional sphere. An adolescent requires cognitive and socio-emotional tools and processes not only to maximize one's learning and development outcomes, but also to lead a happy and meaningful life (Duckworth et.al, 2005). In this context, curiosity stands as a fundamental personality trait of human motivation (Izard, 1977), which is primarily governed by the way an individual directs his/her attention towards a novel or a valued stimuli happening in its immediate environment for learning and growth (Peterson & Seligman, 2004). Curiosity basically provides an undivided attention to an activity and when a person gets a feeling of curiosity within and he/she can persist on task until the goal is achieved (Silvia, 2006). Many research findings have assumed that curiosity use to play an integral role in development of intelligence and wisdom (Renninger, Hidi & Krapp, 1992) leading to a meaningful life with an engaging social relationship (Siddique & D'Arcy 1984; Kasdan, 2009). The concept of meaning of life in this study is referred to the fundamental means of understanding, the way an individual confronts challenges of life, while maximizing his/her unique potential.The constructs of curiosity and meaningfulness promote an individual's purposive orientation towards engaging in growth seeking process. Therefore, personal growth initiative (PGI) stands as a meta-cognitive process containing the "cognitive elements (like motivation to change, personal efficacy to address the change process) and behavioral components for e.g. roles relating to alignment of personal characteristics for attaining goals" (Robitschek, 2003). In order to promote the capacity of engaging in valued behavior, a professional need to accurately perceive and use his own and other's emotions for achieving personal and professional goals. Therefore, the current study is an effort of the present researchers to understand the linking pin between the constructs of curiosity and meaningful life to personal growth initiative.Curiosity and meaningful lifeCuriosity is a mixture of cognition and intrinsic motivation that is inherent in information processing of an individual (Hunt, 1963). In a practical sense curiosity is basically an "intense desire to explore novel and challenging events, motivating people to immerse, act and think in new ways" (Kashdan et.al., 2009). By focusing on the novelty and challenge, there will be an inevitable stretching of information, knowledge, and skill set of an individual leading to cognitive growth. Therefore, the dimension of curiosity assumes an individual's proclivity to stretch one's capability for growth and development.In this context, it is presumed that a student learner having a curiosity-driven intention is able to interact and evolve quickly to an open world. In an earlier study, Langevin (1971) has conducted a research in the area of curiosity and has classified his findings into two important categories. "First, curiosity is viewed as a motivational state and measured with behavioral indices. Second, curiosity is a personality trait that is assessed by personality measures". Therefore, it is inferred that motivation and personality are two important distinctions of curiosity for arousing interest and motivation. For instance, epistemic curiosity defines the desire to obtain the facts and information for intellectual enrichment, whereas perceptual curiosity signifies the distinctive aspiration to acquire experiences through senses (Zuckerman, 1994). The usage of this ability spreads across an individual's life span and serves as an all-encompassing function for building knowledge, skills, expertise and relationships (Izard, 1977). On the ground of exploratory tendency Berlyne (1971) has proposed curiosity as (a) diversive curiosity - enthusiastically looking for varied sources of novelty and challenge and (b) specific curiosity - looking for in-depth understanding of a particular stimulus or activity. …