Csikszentmihalyi, M. (1975). Beyond boredom and anxiety. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

This seems to be one of Csikszentmihalyi's earliest publications and the one where he introduces the concept of flow.  The references list 4 earlier papers and a book chapter published between 1969 and 1973.  Their titles suggest they are examining aspects of Csikszentmihalyi's research which are brought together in this volume.

The starting point of this book is a focus on play and the ability of some people to become so completely immersed in games, they are no longer aware of what is going on around them. Csikszentmihalyi recognises that immersion in pleasurable experiences also happens elsewhere than in play and sets out on a journey exploring enjoyment. He considers three areas of research: self-actualisation and peak experiences, intrinsic motivation and play, but finds none of these provide a satisfactory answer to his questions, so he engages in a number of studies combining the three approaches - this is the focus of the book.

Th book is organised in three sections.  Part 1 focuses on autotelic activities including an extensive literature review on enjoyment and intrinsic motivation; Part 2 opens by offering a theoretical model for enjoyment which includes the introduction of the flow concept and then focuses on 4 studies (chess players, rock climbers, rock dancers and surgeons); in Part 3 the focus moves to everyday experiences of flow and micro-flow experiences. The tests and procedures used in the microflow experiments are included. The book as a whole is a product of its time and some of the stated assumptions together with the implicit sexism (references for example to the girl with her dolls and her brother in his cowboy outfit). However, as a whole, I found this a more satisfying book than later works by the same author, and in particular it does not resemble a self-help manual.

Csikszentmihalyi states that "At present, most of the institutions that take up our time - schools, offices, factories - are organised around the assumption that serious work is grim and unpleasant.  Because of this assumption, most of our time is spent doing unpleasant things. By studying enjoyment, we might learn how to redress this harmful situation." (p1) It is suggested, drawing from behavourism and Maslow's hierarchy of human need that extrinsic rewards are both basic human needs and are necessary in order to induce people to engage in work. Set against this, is a recognition that many people engage in pursuits with no extrinsic rewards - and do so for the enjoyment they gain from so doing.  Such activities are labelled as autotelic.  The research study took the form of pilot interviews with about 60 subjects who engaged in autotelic activities and from this developing a questionnaire and more structured interview form which was used with specific groups of subjects: 30 rock climbers, 30 male chess players, 23 female chess players, 22 professional composers of modern music, 28 female modern dancers, and 40 basket ball players. The rock climbers, male chess players, and dancers ranged from beginners to experts.  The female chess players were the top players in the US.  The basket ball players were all from one of 2 high school teams.

Chapter 2 focuses on identifying 8 reasons, common to all the subjects, for enjoying the activity:

• enjoyment of the activity and use of skills
• the activity itself
• development of personal skills
• friendship companionship
• competition - measuring self against others
• measuring self against own ideals
• emotional release
• prestige, regard, glamour

Of these, the last item was ranked as least important by all subjects in all groups.

Chapter 3 takes as a base the work of Callois who hypothesised that intrinsically rewarding activities are ways of meeting one of 4 central human needs: competition, controlling the unpredictable, transcending limitations and vertigo (overcoming danger). A checklist of 20 common activities was produced which mapped broadly to Callois's categories (in reading this I wonder whether the list or the possibility of using Callois as a theoretical backdrop came first). The subjects were asked whether their feelings during a typical bout of their own activity were very similar, neutral, different or very different with respect to the 20 experiences on the checklist. From this emerged 5 clusters of activities:

• friendship and relaxation
• Risk and chance
• problem solving
• competition
• creative

The checklist appears to include activities which it is probable that most, if not all, subjects will have engaged in, and activities which it is likely that few if any will have experienced, eg 'exposing yourself to radiation to prove your theory' and 'entering a burning house to save a child'. The main thing that appears to emerge in this chapter is that the way people see their activities is not necessarily the same as an outsider would view the same activities. "rock climbers ought to feel that what they do involves risks - the vertiginous alteration of consciousness of those who expose themselves to danger. Yet they place much more emphasis on discovery, problem solving, and relaxing interpersonal experiences." (p33)

Chapter 4 takes us into the second part of the book and introduces the flow concept:

"From here on, we shall refer to this peculiar dynamic state - the holistic sensation that people feel when they act with total involvement- as flow. In the flow state, action follows upon action according to an internal logic that seems to need no conscious intervention by the actor. He experiences it as unified flowing from one moment to the next, in which he is in control of his actions, and in which there is little distinction between self and environment, between stimulus and response, or between past, present and future. Flow is what we have called "the autotelic experience."  There are two reasons for us changing names in midcourse. The first is relatively trivial: flow is less awkward than the former label. The second is more substantive: in calling an experience "autotelic," we implicitly assume that it has no external goals or external rewards; such an assumption is not necessary for flow.  Later we shall see that one of the main traits of flow experiences is that they usually are, to a lesser or greater extent, autotelic - that is, people seek flow primarily for itself, not for the incidental extrinsic rewards that may accrue from it. Yet one may experience flow in any activity, even in some activities that seem least designed to give enjoyment - on the battlefront, on a factory assembly line, or in a concentration camp." (p36)

Csikszentmihalyi identifes a number of elements of flow experiences which relate to but are not the same as the nine characteristics of flow listed in more recent works.  These include: the merging of action and awareness; a focussing attention on a limited stimulus field; a self-forgetfulness or loss of self-awareness; a being in control of actions and of the environment; the experience usually contains coherent, concontradictory demands for action and provide clear, unambiguous feedback to a person's actions; and it is autotelic in nature.

The remainder of the chapter maps out a channel for flow between states of Anxiety, Worry and Boredom using rock climbing as an example.  Tackling a climb beyond what has previously been tackled may induce feelings of worry or anxiety depending on the difficulty of the climb, and tackling an easy climb may be boring unless the climber finds a way of increasing the personal challenge.  "The state of flow is felt when opportunities for action are in balance with the actor's skills." (p49)  The following 4 chapters apply the flow concept to specific groups with lots of quotations and examples.

Chapter 9 movers on to flow patterns in everyday life and introduces the idea of microflow.  Microflow activities appear to be those which punctuate the day and which may be enjoyable in themselves or may facilitate involvement with another activity.  Examples of the former might be watching TV, reading a book or listening to music and of the latter doodling to assist focus in a presentation or daydreaming to help focus attention on a difficult piece of reading. "microflow activities may be as intrinsically rewarding as deep-flow activities, depending on a person's life situation. In fact, the flow model suggests that flow exists on a continuum from extremely low to extremely high complexity." (p 141) A study is described involving 20 university students who were first subjected to a battery of physical and psychological tests and were then asked to undertake a 48 hour observation/recording period in which they were instructed to live normally but record everything they did for pleasure.  The 762 reported events were reduced to 18 categories which were placed into 6 general activity areas: imagining, attending, oral, kinaesthetic, creative and social. The most commonly reported activity areas were social followed by kinaesthetic.

In order to ascertain whether microflow events serve a useful pupose, Csikszentmihalyi goes on to describe an experiment where the 20 subjects involved in identifying micorflow experiences, were asked to spend 48 hours not engaging in these activities.  The battery of psychological and physical tests were repeated and comparisons made suggesting that microflow has a positive role in everyday life, but with many caveats given the small siize of the sample, the self reporting and self monitoring, etc.