Good Business_ Leadership, Flow, and the Making of Meaning - Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi [160]
Limits for processing speech. For the 40-bit-per-second requirement see Liberman, Mattingly, & Turvey (1972) and Nusbaum & Schwab (1986).
The uses of time. The first comprehensive tabulation of how people spend their time was the cross-national project reported in Szalai (1965). The figures reported here are based on my studies with the Experience Sampling Method (ESM), e.g., Csikszentmihalyi, Larson, & Prescott (1977), Csikszentmihalyi & Graef (1980), Csikszentmihalyi & Larson (1984), Csikszentmihalyi & Csikszentmihalyi (1988).
Television watching. The feelings people report while watching television are compared to experiences in other activities in ESM studies by Csikszentmihalyi, Larson, & Prescott (1977), Csikszentmihalyi & Kubey (1981), Larson & Kubey (1983), and Kubey & Csikszentmihalyi (in press).
Psychic energy. The processes taking place in consciousness—thoughts, emotions, will, and memory—have been described by philosophers since the earliest times, and by some of the earliest psychologists (e.g., Ach 1905). For a review, see Hilgard (1980). Energistic approaches to consciousness include Wundt (1902), Lipps (1899), Ribot (1890), Binet (1890), and Jung (1928 [1960]). Some contemporary approaches are represented by Kahneman (1973), Csikszentmihalyi (1978, 1987), and Hoffman, Nelson, & Houck (1983).
Attention and culture. The Melanesians’ ability to remember precise locations by floating on the surface of the sea is described by Gladwin (1970). Reference to the many names for snow used by Eskimos can be found in Bourguignon (1979).
The self. Psychologists have thought of innumerable ways of describing the self, from the social-psychological approaches of George Herbert Mead (1934 [1970]) and Sullivan (1953) to the analytic psychology of Carl Gustav Jung (1933 [1961]). Currently, however, psychologists try to avoid speaking of the “self”; instead they limit themselves to describing the “self concept.” A good account of how this concept develops is given by Damon & Hart (1982). Another approach uses the term “self-efficacy” (see Bandura 1982). The model of the self developed in these pages has been influenced by many sources, and is described in Csikszentmihalyi (1985a) and Csikszentmihalyi & Csikszentmihalyi (1988).
Disorder in consciousness. Psychologists have studied negative emotions, such as anger, distress, sadness, fear, shame, contempt, or disgust, very extensively: Ekman (1972), Frijda (1986), Izard, Kagan, & Zajonc (1984), and Tomkins (1962). But these investigators generally assume that each emotion is separately “wired” in the central nervous system as a response to a specific set of stimuli, instead of being an integrated response of the self system. Clinical psychologists and psychiatrists are familiar with “disphoric moods” such as anxiety and depression which interfere with concentration and normal functioning (Beck 1976, Blumberg & Izard 1985, Hamilton 1982, Lewinsohn & Libet 1972, Seligman et al. 1984).
Order. What order—or psychic negentropy—implies will be discussed in the pages below; see also Csikszentmihalyi (1982a) and Csikszentmihalyi & Larson (1984). Basically, it refers to the lack of conflict among the bits of information present in an individual’s consciousness. When the information is in harmony with a person’s goals, the consciousness of that person is “ordered.” The same concept applies also to lack of conflict between individuals, when their goals are in harmony with each other.
Flow. The original research and the theoretical model of the flow experience were first fully reported in Beyond Boredom and Anxiety (Csikszentmihalyi 1975). Since then a great number of works have used the flow concept, and extensive new research has been accumulating. A few examples are Victor Turner’s (1974) application of the concept to anthropology, Mitchell’s (1983) to sociology, and Crook’s (1980) to evolution. Eckblad (1981), Amabile (1983), and Deci & Ryan (1985) have used it in developing motivational