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. 2022 Apr 7:13:815665.
doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.815665. eCollection 2022.

A Scoping Review of Flow Research

Corinna Peifer  1 , Gina Wolters  2 , László Harmat  3 , Jean Heutte  4 , Jasmine Tan  5 , Teresa Freire  6 , Dionísia Tavares  6 , Carla Fonte  7 , Frans Orsted Andersen  8 , Jef van den Hout  9 , Milija Šimleša  10 , Linda Pola  11 , Lucia Ceja  12 , Stefano Triberti  13
Affiliations

A Scoping Review of Flow Research

Corinna Peifer et al. Front Psychol. .

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.

Keywords: contextual level; cultural level; flow; individual level; scoping review.

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Figures

FIGURE 1
FIGURE 1
Categorization of flow research 2000–2016.
See this image and copyright information in PMC

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