A Scoping Review of Flow Research

Corinna Peifer (1) , Gina Wolters (2) , Laszlo Harmat' (3) , Jean Heutte (4) , Jasmine Tan (5) , Teresa Freire (6) , Dionisa Tavares (6) , Carla Fonte (7) , Frans Orsted Andersen (8) , Jef van den Hout (9) , Linda Pola (10) , Lucia Ceja (11) , Stefano Triberti (12)

1 Department of Psychology, University of Lübeck
2 RUB - Ruhr University Bochum = Ruhr-Universität Bochum
3 Department of Psychology, Linnaeus University
4 Trigone-CIREL
5 Department of Psychology [Goldsmiths University of London]
6 Universidade do Minho = University of Minho [Braga]
7 Fernando Pessoa University
8 Aarhus University [Aarhus]
9 TU/e - Eindhoven University of Technology [Eindhoven]
10 UNIMI - Università degli Studi di Milano = University of Milan
11 IESE Business school - University of Navarra
12 Department of Psychology, Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore of Milan

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 – 2016. To develop this scoping review, we followed the steps proposed by Arksey and O’Malley (2005). Overall, 253 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.

Mots clés: Flow; Scoping review; Personality; Motivation; Physiology; Emotion; Cognition; Behavior; Interindividual Flow; context; culture

Domaines: Psychologie; Education

Corinna Peifer, Gina Wolters, Laszlo Harmat', Jean Heutte, Jasmine Tan, et al.. A Scoping Review of Flow Research. Frontiers in Psychology, 2022, 13, pp.201-227. ⟨10.3389/fpsyg.2022.815665⟩. ⟨halshs-03529837⟩