ABSTRACT
Flow is a gratifying state of deep involvement and absorption that individuals report when facing a challenging activity and they perceive adequate abilities to cope with it (EFRN, 2014). The flow concept was introduced by Csikszentmihalyi in 1975, and interest in flow research is growing. However, to our best knowledge, no scoping review exists that takes a systematic look at studies on flow which were published between the years 2000 and 2016. Overall, 252 studies have been included in this review. Our review (1) provides a framework to cluster flow research, (2) gives a systematic overview about existing studies and their findings, and (3) provides an overview about implications for future research. The provided framework consists of three levels of flow research. In the first "Individual" level are the categories for personality, motivation, physiology, emotion, cognition, and behavior. The second "Contextual" level contains the categories for contextual and interindividual factors and the third "Cultural" level contains cultural factors that relate to flow. Using our framework, we systematically present the findings for each category. While flow research has made progress in understanding flow, in the future, more experimental and longitudinal studies are needed to gain deeper insights into the causal structure of flow and its antecedents and consequences.
ABSTRACT
Self-efficacy is a well-known psychological resource, being positively associated with increased performance. Furthermore, results from field studies suggest a positive impact of self-efficacy on flow experience, which has not yet been tested experimentally. In this study, we manipulated self-efficacy by means of positive feedback and investigated whether self-efficacy serves as a mediator in the relationship between positive feedback and flow and in the relationship between positive feedback and performance. Our sample consisted of 102 participants (63 female, 39 male). The experimental group received positive feedback after completing 5 min of mental arithmetic tasks on a computer, whereas the control group received no feedback. A second session of a mental arithmetic task was then completed for 5 min. Mediation analyses confirmed that specific self-efficacy mediated a positive effect of positive feedback on flow as well as on both performance measures (quality and quantity) in a subsequent task. However, direct effects of feedback on flow and on performance were not significant, which suggests the presence of other mechanisms that remain to be investigated.
ABSTRACT
Flow has been defined as a pleasant psychological state that people experience when completely absorbed in an activity. Previous correlative evidence showed that the vagal tone (as indexed by heart rate variability) is a reliable marker of flow. So far, it has not yet been demonstrated that the vagus nerve plays a causal role in flow. To explore this we used transcutaneous vagus nerve stimulation (tVNS), a novel non-invasive brain stimulation technique that increases activation of the locus coeruleus (LC) and norepinephrine release. A sham/placebo-controlled, randomized cross-over within-subject design was employed to infer a causal relation between the stimulated vagus nerve and flow as measured using the Flow Short-Scale in 32 healthy young volunteers. In both sessions, while being stimulated, participants had to rate their flow experience after having performed a task for 30 min. Active tVNS, compared to sham stimulation, decreased flow (as indexed by absorption scores). The results can be explained by the network reset theory, which assumes that high-phasic LC activity promotes a global reset of attention over exploitation of the current focus of attention, allowing rapid behavioral adaptation and resulting in decreased absorption scores. Furthermore, our findings corroborate the hypothesis that the vagus nerve and noradrenergic system are causally involved in flow.