Optimal Experience
The quality of life in fundamental respects is determined by the quality of experience moment to moment. For instance, we may be working to better the world, support a lifestyle, or provide for our family but the quality of our work life reflects the mix of states - engagement, worry, and boredom, for example - that we experience while we are working.
One starting point in thinking about the quality of experience concerns attention. As William James observed many years ago, “My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind.” James implied that selective attention is a matter of active choice and willing consent – what we agree to attend to – but of course others have a stake in how we invest our attention and this has never been more true than today. Whether we attend to one thing rather than another affects the quality of our experience in the moment. Cumulatively, how we have invested our attention day by day, and year by year, defines the life that we have led.
A form of optimal experience that the QLRC has investigated in depth is the flow state – the deep, enjoyable concentration experienced when attention is fully absorbed by the ongoing stream of activity. In both our conceptual and empirical work, we investigate how the quality of immediate experience, positive and negative, connects to flourishing. Vital engagement builds upon work on flow theory by investigating the co-experience of flow and meaning at the momentary level.
Funding from the Fletcher Jones Fund (Claremont Graduate University), Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, Spencer Foundation.