Mihaly csikszentmihalyi flow pdf download

It has the advantage of reducing to a common denominator the main dimensions of the phenomenon, which now are expressed in noncomparable terms, such as: the process of socialization, its out- comes, the characteristics of models, social costs, and benefits. All these concepts refer to transformations of attention, or to gains and losses sustained through its investment.

The various forms of socialization—imitation, modeling, or inter- nalization—can be seen as involving different patternings of attention. And, finally, such a theory establishes links between socialization and other processes based on attention, like optimal and pathological functioning, and the maintenance of social structure, which is the topic we shall turn to next.

Attention and Social Systems A social system exists when the interaction between two or more persons affects their respective states i. In any permanent social system these effects are predictable and reasonably clear; we call them culture, norms, social structure, depending on the forms they take.

To simplify matters they can all be subsumed under the general term: constraints. A social system that fails to constrain the states of persons ceases to exist. This is easiest to see in the case of the simplest social system, the dyad. A dyad survives only as long as the two people in it continue to pay enough attention to each other to make their relationship distinctly different from a chance relationship.

For example, if two people do not agree to constrain their respective schedules so that they can meet at a common time, their encounters will be random, and hence nonsystemic. Unless two people synchronize their attentional structures to a certain degree by agreeing to common constraints, a relationship will be short-lived. Deciding to be at the same place, doing the same thing together, feeling similar emotions in response to similar stimuli requires restructuring of attention.

Without it friends would not be friends, lovers would not be lovers. Even ordinary conversation between two people is only possible because each person abides by a complex set of constraints regulating when and how he should take the turn to speak or to listen Duncan If one were not to pay attention to the cues that structure con- versation, that interaction would soon become random, or stop before long.

A university exists only as long as people are willing to constrain their thoughts, feelings, and actions in ways specific to that structure of attention that makes a university different from, say, a factory or hospital.

These rather obvious remarks acquire more weight when we recall that atten- tion is in limited supply. It follows that the creation and maintenance of social systems is dependent on the same source on which individual experience depends.

The implications of this set of relationships has hardly been explored. Studies that directly deal with the social-structuring effects of attention can be found apparently only in the ethological literature.

Murton et al. Kummer and Kurt have remarked that the social status of female hamadryas baboons is best revealed by the way they restrict their attention exclusively within their own group, and direct it primarily to its male leader. From these observations and the ones he himself collected, Chance concluded that attention has a binding quality…. The amount of attention directed within a group… will then reveal the main feature of the structure of attention upon which the relationships within the group are based… The assessment of attention structure provides a way of describing and accounting for many features of dominance relationships in several different species Chance , p.

But in human social systems the phenomenon is much more complex. It is not enough to determine who pays attention to whom to uncover the underlying attentional structure that allows the system to exist. Human systems differ from other social structures in that they are largely based on attention that is objectified and stored in symbolic form. Perhaps the most effective of these sym- bols is money.

A wage earner exchanges psychic energy for money by investing his attention in goals determined for him by someone else. Thus, to understand the structure of human groups it would be misleading to simply measure the direction and duration of gaze among individuals, a procedure that might be satisfactory to reveal the structure of a baboon troop. It is necessary instead to determine the pattern of symbolically mediated constraints on attention.

The major social institutions—economy, law, government, media—are all formalized structures of attention; they define who should pay attention to what. This formulation allows us to restate one of the basic paradoxes about man and society. Every thinker who has dealt with the issue has recognized a basic conflict between individual needs and social constraints.

The model of attention describes that conflict more economically than most theories. The point is that the psychic energy necessary to develop a satisfying personal life i. Conflicting demands on the same supply of limited psychic energy cause the ambivalent relationship between man and society.

An optimal social system is one that derives the psychic energy necessary for its existence from the voluntary focusing of attention of its members. In a current study, we have begun to explore the way symbols attract attention, and how they serve to integrate personal experiences on the one hand, and promote social solidarity on the other. This involves interviewing families with questions concerning objects and events inside the home, the neighborhood, and the metropolitan area that have special significance for the respondents.

Although this research is beginning to provide some basic information about the ways in which people objectify their attention in symbols, it is only the barest of beginnings. The field of possible research applications is simply enormous. An ideal first step, for example, would be a community study in which the psychic energy output from individuals would be balanced against the input of such energy in the social system.

The main questions to be answered would be: How much of the total attention invested by individuals is voluntary? How much of it is structured by the constraints of the social system? What are the forms in which psychic energy is transformed before it is used up by the social system e.

How do the patterns of attention allocation dis- covered relate to personal development, and to community strength and stability? Only after systematic studies of this kind are conducted will we begin to under- stand more clearly how personal life satisfaction, personal and societal pathology, and the survival of social systems are related. Summary and Conclusions Attention provides the behavioral sciences with a concept that bridges a vast range of phenomena from the micro-personal to the macro-social.

Attention is required for a person to control what content shall be admitted to consciousness. A person who feels able to direct his or her attention freely enjoys the experience and develops a positive self-concept. But social systems require highly complex attention structures.

The pool of attention on which social systems draw for their continued existence is the same limited amount on which individuals depend to structure their own consciousness. Socialization is the process that mediates between the spontaneous allocation of attention by individuals, and the voluntary patterns required by social systems.

Optimal functioning occurs when there is no conflict between spontaneous and voluntary demands on attention, that is, when persons voluntarily concentrate on goals that are in line with sociocultural constraints. Therefore personal development and the development of sociocultural systems both depend on the economy of attention. How much attention is paid, to what, and under what conditions—i.

The main issues of a holistic behavioral science revolve around the question of how and where attention is allocated, and who is in control of this process. Research methods necessary to answer that question are beginning to emerge. Potentially it is not too difficult to determine how attention is allocated.

Obser- vation of gaze direction, records of involvement over time, time-budget records get at molar behavioral indicators that have a strong face validity. Such measures must be complemented by data on symbolically mediated attention, such as allocation and control of money, status, and other symbolic resources. To tap the inner movements of attention one must obtain records of fantasy, imagination, and other less obvious mental processes. More crippling than the methodological lag, which can be overcome, is the theoretical disarray that presently surrounds the holistic study of attention.

Until a consistent and coherent theory of attention is developed, research results will continue to be trivial, no matter how brilliant the techniques we devise. Only a new conceptual paradigm will be able to inspire new research, direct it along the most promising paths, and then relate findings to each other and explain them in a meaningful context. Acknowledgments The author wishes to thank Barbara Rubinstein and Ronald Graef for sug- gestions and criticism in the editing of the manuscript.

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Chapter 2 The Experience Sampling Method Reed Larson and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi The Experience Sampling Method ESM is a research procedure for studying what people do, feel, and think during their daily lives, It consists in asking individuals to provide systematic self-reports at random occasions during the waking hours of a normal week.

Sets of these self-reports from a sample of individuals create an archival file of daily experience. Using this file, it becomes possible to address such questions as these: How do people spend their time?

What do they usually feel like when engaged in various activities? How do men and women, adolescents and adults, disturbed and normal samples differ in their daily psychological states? This chapter describes the Experience Sampling Method and illustrates its use for studying a broad range of issues.

The origins of interest in daily experience and the origins of the method can be traced to numerous sources within the field of psychology. He believed that, by examining the psychological life space, it would be possible to understand the forces that structure daily thought and behavior. Regrettably, Lewin did not have a method for studying daily experience, and his American followers for example, Roger Barker, Herbert Wright, P.

Gump turned to a behavioral H. Reis Ed. The observational methods that these followers developed had the additional drawback of being useful only for studying public behavior. Observers could not follow adults into the private segments of life without disrupting the phenomena to be observed. Early diary studies by Bevans and Altshuller and more sophisticated recent diary studies Szalai et al. For example, a cross-national study revealed that American and European adults spent far less time relaxing than adults elsewhere in the world do Szalai et al.

Again, however, the focus was on behavior; there was little attention to how people think or feel in the different parts of their lives. Procedures for measuring intrapsychic variables have emerged from other areas of psychology and sociology.

Personality research has fostered development of psychometric procedures that use paper-and-pencil questionnaires to investigate thoughts and feelings. Most psychometric research has attempted to measure stable traits rather than daily experience.

However, in recent years interest in evaluating quality of life has increased; internal experience is viewed not merely as an intervening variable but as an end in itself Campbell They found little effect. Current research attempts to investigate various segments of normal existence Andrews and Withey ; Campbell et al. Methodological problems, however, have stood in the way of this conceptual shift.

Questionnaire and interview measures have proven fallible for the assess- ment of stable personality traits. Researchers have challenged the ecological validity of interview and questionnaire data obtained outside the context to which they refer Willems Evidence suggests that people are not good at recon- structing their experience after the fact Yarmey and that they cannot pro- vide reliable assessments of complex dimensions of their own personality or of their experiences Fiske ; Mischel Hence, there is a question as to how useful such assessments can be for attempts to learn about daily states and activities.

In sum, there is a convergence of interest on the study of daily life, but there is also a methodological stalemate. The Experience Sampling Method is not a panacea; it has problems and limitations of its own. Description of the Method The Procedure. To accom- plish this objective, participants carry electronic pagers the kind that doctors sometimes carry , which signal them according to a random schedule. The signal is a cue to complete a self-report questionnaire that asks about their experience at that moment in time.

Participants might be driving a car, eating supper, or watching television. When the pager signals, they are to complete a report if it is at all possible. Typically, the schedule specifies one signal at a random moment within every 2-hour block of time between 8.

Variations have included extending the schedule on weekend evenings and sending fewer signals per day over a longer period of time see, for example, Savin-Williams and Demo It is essential only for the set of signals to be representative and for the signals to occur without forewarning to the person who receives them.

Upon receipt of each random signal, participants respond to questions about their objective situation and their subjective state at that moment. Responses to such items have been obtained in an open-ended format and coded into mutually exclusive categories with inter-rater reliabilities ranging between 0.

These questions have typically been structured into semantic differential or Likert-type scales. Figure 2. Obviously, a great deal of latitude is possible in the items that can be included.

Data from many individuals provide an archive of infor- mation about daily experience—how people spend their time, with whom they spend it, and how they feel in different contexts—that allows numerous questions to be addressed.

Obtaining these data requires some care and concern. The Experience Sampling Method is a means for communicating with people about their daily lives, a transaction requiring what Offer and Sabshin have termed a research alliance—a mutual understanding about the procedures and ends of the study.

Jokes about our being FBI agents suggest the potential for misunderstanding. Most participants find that the procedure is rewarding in some way, and most are willing to share their experience. However, cooperation depends on their trust and on their belief that the research is worthwhile. Before we begin, we explain to each person the purpose of our research—that we are interested in learning about daily experience.

At the conclusion, we sit down with each person and review the week to discuss how it went and to share the sampling that has been obtained of their experience. To date, the method has been used with more than a dozen different samples.

Descriptive statistics for our two largest samples can give the reader a sense of how readily people participate. In a study of adolescent experience, we sought a stratified random sample from the population of a large and heterogeneous high school. DMCA and Copyright : The book is not hosted on our servers, to remove the file please contact the source url. If you see a Google Drive link instead of source url, means that the file witch you will get after approval is just a summary of original book or the file has been already removed.

During flow, people typically experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience teaches how, by ordering the information that enters our consciousness, we can discover true happiness, unlock our potential, and greatly improve the quality of our lives.

Gemplus Smart Card Reader Windows 7. Advanced embedding details, examples, and help! Publication date Topics mihaly , csikszentmihalyi , flow , psychology , optimal , experience , creativity , life , positive , people , information , potential , investigation , book , books , viral Collection opensource Language English.

Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi 's investigations of " optimal experience " have revealed that what makes an experience genuinely satisfying is a state of consciousness called flow. During flow, people typically experience deep enjoyment, creativity, and a total involvement with life. Csikszentmihalyi demonstrates the ways this positive state can be controlled, not just left to chance. Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience teaches how, by ordering the information that enters our consciousness, we can discover true happiness, unlock our potential, and greatly improve the quality of our lives.

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