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Flow is the state of consciousness wherein one is completely absorbed in one's activities, to the exclusion of all other thoughts and feelings. Being an experience of energized focus, low anxiety, and total enjoyment, it is the point of perfect harmony within the mind. This study investigated the achievement of flow in competitive versus non-competitive situations and its interaction with task difficulty. The Yerkes-Dodson law suggests that performance on a task is influenced by the inverse interaction between competition and difficulty, and we predicted a similar pattern for flow. Thirty-two participants performed word search puzzle tasks manipulated on two levels of difficulty; completing them either under competitive conditions (where participants, in groups of four, were informed that they would be ranked against each other) or non-competitive conditions (where participants were simply instructed to perform the task to the best of their abilities). Supporting our hypothesis, results indicated an extremely significant interaction between competition and difficulty (p < .001); competitive conditions produce greater flow for easy tasks and non-competitive conditions for difficult tasks. However, on closer examination, we found gender differences in this interaction pattern while females adhered to this Yerkes-Dodson interaction, males showed greater flow for competitive tasks regardless of task difficulty. The implications of these findings enable educators to identify whether certain learning tasks are more conducive to competitive or non-competitive situations for the achievement of flow, depending on task difficulty and gender.
Keywords: flow, yerkes - dodson law, competition
Originally proposed by the positive psychologist, Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1975), flow can be described as the state of complete absorption in an activity to the point that nothing else matters. Csikszentmihalyi (1975) initially studied flow in various leisure and athletic activities including rock climbing, dance, chess and basketball, activities that contained inherent rewards for individuals. Over the years, the concept of flow has been extended to contexts of work (Csikszentmihalyi & LeFevre, 1989) and learning (Craig, Graesser, Sullins & Gholson, 2004) and has been connected to improvements in creativity (Csikszentmihalyi, 1996), positive affect (Trevino & Webster, 1992), and life satisfaction (Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). Further there has been a flood of research on the expression of flow in World Wide Web and digital gaming environments, implying that the consideration of flow in their development can...