Optimal Experience and Personal Growth: Flow and the Consolidation of Place Identity

Abstract

This study examined the relationship between flow experience and place identity, based on eudaimonistic identity theory (EIT) which prioritizes self-defining activities as important for an individual’s identification of his/her goals, values, beliefs, and interests corresponding to one’s own identity development or enhancement. This study focuses on place identity, the identity’s features relating to a person’s relation with her/his place. The study is also based on flow theory, according to which some salient features of an activity experience are important for happiness and well-being. Questionnaire surveys on Italian and Greek residents focused on their perceived flow and place identity in relation to their own specific local place experiences. The overall findings revealed that flow experience occurring in one’s own preferred place is widely reported as resulting from a range of self-defining activities, irrespective of gender or age, and it is positively and significantly associated with one’s own place identity. Such findings provide the first quantitative evidence about the link between flow experienced during meaningfully located self-defining activities and identity experienced at the place level, similarly to the corresponding personal and social levels that had been previously already empirically tested. Results are also discussed in terms of their implications for EIT’s understanding and enrichment, especially by its generalization from the traditional, personal identity level up to that of place identity. More generally, this study has implications for maintaining or enhancing one’s own place identity, and therefore people–place relations, by means of facilitating a person’s flow experience within psychologically meaningful places.

Apple or Huawei: Understanding Flow, Brand Image, Brand Identity, Brand Personality and Purchase Intention of Smartphone

“…Furthermore, brand identity proves to be influential via flow, and this has not yet been studied in previous work, nor within the context of the smartphone market. However, it could be interpreted that, being a parallel identity construct to both personal and place identity which is embedded in social identity theory, the link between identity and flow is coherent with our previous findings relating flow with other kinds of identity levels' constructs [23,24,66]. The effect of brand identity on purchase intention, though not yet studied insofar to our knowledge, parallels constructs' effects like self-identity [13], ethical identity [14], and cultural identity [16], which are all connected to purchase intention.…”

“…In such a way, brand communication could have an impact on consumers' enjoyable flow [56]. The innovative finding that the brand identity predicts flow experience, which confirmed hypothesis H3b, also supports our previous work on flow-identity correlations [23,24,66], and further provides evidence for questions raised for the flow-identity pathway relationship. Moreover, brand personality was also found to be predictive for flow experience (H4b).…”

“…At the level of social identity, Mao and colleagues found that flow was significantly and positively associated with social identity strength in U.S., China, and Spain [24]. At the place level, significant correlations between place identity and flow experience were found in samples from both Greece and Italy [66]. Based on the above literature, we can ascertain only that there is a positive correlation between identity and flow, but we do not know whether it is because flow experience brings identity or identity brings a happy psychological experience, which accounts for the positive correlation between flow and identity.…”

Cultural tourism and rural entrepreneurship: A case study of a Scandinavian literary festival

“…Hird and Kvistgaard (2010), Ritchie and Hudson (2009), and Mossberg (2007) provide overviews dealing with experience as a concept in defining, understanding, and empirically analyzing tourism. Research in psychology (Bonaiuto et al, 2016;Csikszentmihalyi, 1990) develops the concept of the optimal experience within the framework of a "flow channel" model. This flow channel approach is useful to represent experience within the analysis of touristic behaviour and is central to understanding how cultural tourism is successfully and optimally produced.…”

Examining the Effects of Perceived Telepresence, Interactivity, and Immersion on Pilot Situation Awareness During a Virtual Reality Flight Exercise

“…Similarly, Bonaiuto et al (2016) validated their hypothesis that flow states are not affected by age or gender. However, these studies come from the broader flow literature.…”