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LIT-1853: Investigating the “Flow” Experience: Key Conceptual and Operational Issues

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Properties4
StatusActive — read in full 2026-10-30 (NOTE-1429), from the open-access published article (CC BY) in PubMed Central, PMC7033418, fetched as XML through the Europe PMC REST API. A conceptual review: 42 studies from 2014–2019 operationalized flow in 24 ways, 17 of them without enjoyment. Abuhamdeh argues that flow, as Csikszentmihalyi defined it, is a discrete and highly enjoyable state, distinct from its conditions, and that ordinary absorption is task involvement, "not inherently enjoyable". It reports the dispute the record needs: Seligman's "absence of emotion" in flow, and Csikszentmihalyi's own remark that flow experiences may not be "particularly pleasurable at the time". It answers them by definition and by appraisal theory, not with data on how flow feels during the episode.
Tagsmotivation, psychometrics, emotion-and-affect
Cited as “grounds” byCLAIM-441 — Flow tells against the potential account's condition that valence is undefined where no pair is contested: on the record's own account of flow nothing is overridden because an activity's immediate reward and its longer-run value coincide, yet flow is reported as positive, so either flow's positivity is intrinsic pleasantness and not goal-conduciveness valence, or flow keeps contested pairs its processes settle among themselves, or the positivity comes after the episode and not during it, or the condition is wrong
Cited as “paper” byNOTE-1429 — Abuhamdeh — Investigating the flow experience

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Sami Abuhamdeh (2020), Frontiers in Psychology 11:158 — DOI-10.3389/fpsyg.2020.00158, PMC7033418

Key takeaways

  • The flow literature has no common operationalization: 24 measures in 42 studies of 2014–2019, most continuous, 17 without enjoyment, many mixing the state with its conditions.
  • On Csikszentmihalyi’s conception, flow is enjoyable by definition, rare, and discrete.
  • Absorption without that enjoyment is better called task involvement, and the motivational side is better called intrinsic motivation.
  • Whether flow is felt as positive during the episode is disputed in the literature (Seligman; a passage of Csikszentmihalyi 1990). The paper argues it is, from the definition and from appraisal theory, with no data of its own.

Standing in the record

Filed on 2026-10-30 for CLAIM-441, which asks whether flow is positive during the episode or only in retrospect. The record’s anchor for flow, Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi (LIT-914), could not be read; this review reports the dispute about that question and takes a side.

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