Seeing and mastering difficulty: The role of affective change in achievement flow

Abstract

Achievement flow involves total absorption in an activity, high concentration without effort and merging of thought and action. The authors propose that achievement flow is facilitated by dynamic alternatives between low positive affect (“seeing difficulty”) and high positive affect (“mastering difficulty”). Consistent with this hypothesis, three studies showed that traits associated with reduced positive affect (avoidant adult attachment, schizoid-like personality style, introversion) and traits supportive of restoring positive affect (mastery orientation) predicted achievement flow, as assessed with a new operant motive test (OMT). Achievement flow motives were further found to be associated with flow experiences in achievement tasks (Study 1), intrinsic motivation in an academic context (Study 2), and volitional facilitation as assessed by removal of Stroop interference after experimentally induced difficulty and positive affect (Study 3). These findings offer converging evidence that flow experiences arise from dynamic changes in positive affect.

Keywords:

• Flow
• Implicit motives
• State versus trait
• Positive affect
• PSI theory

Acknowledgements

The first author would like to thank Andy Elliot for his support during her post-doc year in Rochester, where the data of Study 2 were collected.

Notes

¹A comprehensive scoring manual for the OMT is available in German and in English from the authors.

²The absence of convergent validity between achievement flow and nAch does not discount the implicit nature of our measure. Both measures (TAT and OMT) assess motive-related knowledge that is rooted in preconceptual (partly even preverbal) states of development. However, the OMT extends the assessment of basic social needs from the preconceptual to the level of self-regulatory support of motive enactment (for a more comprehensive discussion on TAT and OMT see Baumann, Kazén, & Kuhl, 2010). Our focus on purely intrinsic types of regulation may explain the lack of convergence with nAch. The intrinsic component is not strongly represented in Winter's (1994) coding system in which nAch is not coded unless standards of excellence are explicitly mentioned. In OMT achievement flow, in contrast, standards of excellence may be implicated in high concentration, curiosity, and interest but do not have to be explicated. The overlap between flow motive and nAch may vary depending on the coding system for the TAT. For example, more fine-grained measures of nAch such as Heckhausen's (1963) system or the original coding system by McClelland et al. (1953) may unearth more of the commonality between measures. Nevertheless, our measure is expected to explain unique variance in flow experience because it is confined to the intrinsic component of the achievement motive.

³Achievement flow motive was high for introverted students who were oriented towards mastery-approach goals (M=0.62). In contrast, introverted students who were not oriented towards mastery-approach reached the lowest levels of achievement flow (M=− 0.44). Extraverted students reached moderate levels of achievement flow motive irrespective of their mastery-approach orientation (M=− 0.02 for high mastery-approach vs. M=0.03 for low mastery-approach).

⁴The inhibition component differentiates intention memory from the concept of working memory (e.g., Baddeley, 1996 , 2000) and is necessary whenever a specific response is to be delayed or when a rather abstract intention is maintained in intention memory and premature specification of that intention is to be prevented. Furthermore, intention memory represents action-related rather than sensory information that is proposed to remain active until enactment of the intention (cf. Zeigarnik, 1927).