Symposium 6th World Congress on Positive Psychology 2019

Distinguishing Microflow from Tedium and Leisure (#408)

Orin Davis 1
  1. Quality of Life Laboratory, New York, NY, United States

Despite the existence of a significant body research on the nature and context of flow (e.g., Delle Fave et al., 2011; Jackson & Eklund, 2004), the dynamics among the nine components of flow and the precise mechanisms that yield the emergence of flow remain somewhat unknown (cf. Ceja & Navarro, 2012), as do the boundaries of the continuum of experiences ranging from deep flow to microflow (Davis, 2010). In a pilot study conducted in early 2018, an intervention designed to increase microflow experiences failed in large part because of a confound in which participants could not differentiate between leisure experiences that did and did not qualify as a microflow experience (adding tedium to the list of possible classifications for the experience complicated matters further). In attempt to unpack this confounded result, the current study extends the pilot to a larger sample and takes into account more precise conceptions of flow, leisure (Freire et al., 2016; Freire, 2017), and tedium in order to further clarify the boundaries of flow experiences and how to increase their frequency. The differences between microflow, tedium, and leisure will be discussed in terms of their respective definitions, benefits, and roles in productively/positively filling interstitial time.