This edited volume explores the role of arts and meditation within educational settings, and looks in particular at the preventive and developmental function of the arts in educational contexts through different theoretical perspectives. Encompassing research from an array of disciplines including theatre, psychology, neuroscience, music, psychiatry, and mindfulness, the book draws insights relevant to a broad spectrum of interdisciplinary fields. Chapters are divided into thematic sections, each outlining praxes and emphasising how educating within and through the arts can provide tools for critical thinking, creativity and a sense of agency, consequently fulfilling the need of well-being and contributing towards human flourishing. Ultimately, the book focuses on the role the arts have played in our understanding of physical and mental health, and demonstrates the new-found significance of the discipline in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. With its interdisciplinary and timely nature, this book will be essential reading for scholars, academics, and post-graduate researchers in the field of arts education, creative therapies, neuroscience, psychology, and mindfulness.

Musical engagement is influenced by both environmental and genetic factors. Here, we explored nongeneticinfluences on musical engagement by performing semi-structured interviews of 10 Swedishmonozygotic twin pairs that were highly discordant for piano practicing. The interviews were organizedinto five sections – (i) perceived reasons for the discordance; (ii) childhood differences in specific musicrelated variables; (iii) strong memories of music; (iv) the perceived meaning of music in life and forhealth; and (v) language interests – and analyzed using response categorization. The playing twins froman early age found music more interesting and enjoyable than their co-twins and also gave richer andmore elaborate descriptions of the meaning of music in life, in several cases emphasizing that music wasimportant for their personal identity. In line with this, an analysis of previously collected web questionnairedata showed that the playing twins had a significantly higher openness to experience and pronenessto experience flow during musical activities. In contrast, the twins reported essentially no within-pairdifferences in the musical engagement of their peers, parental support, music teacher, ensemble playing,public performances, and their interest and aptitude for languages. The interviews gave no indication thatthe differences in musical engagement were caused by systematic environmental influences that wereconsistent across twin pairs. Rather, the respondents presented a wide range of different explanations fortheir discordance in musical activity, suggesting that the remaining influences on musical engagement,when genetics and family environment are controlled for, may be highly individual and idiosyncratic.

Flow is the subjective experience of effortless attention, reduced self-awareness, and enjoyment that typicallyoccurs during optimal task performance. Previous studies have suggested that flow may be associated with anon-reciprocal coactivation of the sympathetic and parasympathetic systems and, on a cortical level, with astate of hypofrontality and implicit processing. Here, we test these hypotheses, using the computer gameTETRIS as model task. The participants (n= 77) played TETRIS under three conditions that differed in difficulty(Easy b Optimal b Difficult). Cardiac and respiratory activities, and the average oxygenation changes of theprefrontal cortexwere measured continuously with functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS) during performance.The Optimal condition was characterized by the highest levels of state flow, positive affect, and effortlessattention. The associations between self-reported psychological flow and physiological measures were investigatedusing a series of repeated measures linear mixed model analyses. The results showed that higher flowwas associated with larger respiratory depth and lower LF. The higher respiratory depth during high flow isindicative of a more relaxed state with an increased parasympathetic activity, and thus provides partial supportfor the main hypotheses. There was no association between frontal cortical oxygenation and flow, even at liberalthresholds; i.e. we found no support that flow is related to a state of hypofrontality.

The aim of this chapter is to discuss the literature on psychological flow experiences in relation to artistic creation and performance. In the first section, we review studies on state flow in music and dance. In the second section, we discuss collective flow experiences (’group flow’) in artistic performances. The third section elaborates on the neurobiological underpinnings of creative cognition in relation to flow, and the relationship between flow, creativity, and quality of performance. In the fourth section, we discuss the relationship between dispositional flow (’flow proneness’), expertise, and artistic creation. In summary, the literature on flow and artistic creativity is still relatively small, and more studies would be important to test key hypotheses and resolve inconsistencies in the literature, in particular concerning relations between state flow and creative output. We conclude by suggesting some possible future directions for work in the field.

The need to establish a research field within psychology didactics at secondary level has recently been voiced by several researchers internationally. An analysis of a Swedish case coming out of secondary level education in psychology presented here provides an illustration that complexity thinking-derived from complexity theory-is uniquely placed to consider and indicate possible solutions to challenges, described by researchers as central to the foundation of a new field. Subject matter didactics is defined for the purpose of this paper as a combination of general didactics and subject matter content, and considering the international nature of research traditions coming out of psychology, the implications of the results presented here cannot be regarded as limited solely to national concerns. An online survey was sent to secondary schools in Sweden. Discussions and lectures along with teaching to the book-alternatively used as inspiration-emerged as central from the thematic analysis of the results, providing the first mapping of teaching practices secondary level psychology in Sweden. An analysis, founded on complexity thinking-combined with a model enabling a delimitation of the scope of study-focused on time use and the importance placed on self-knowledge, along with the transformation of theory into practice. The former pointed to a teacher-centered nested subsystem (e.g., asymmetric relations between teachers and students), whereas the latter pointed to student-centered nested subsystems coming out of embodied knowledge (e.g., students as node) where psychological perspectives are learnt through self-reflection, case studies, and everyday life experiences (turning theory to practice), implying a holistic approach. The analysis applied to the Swedish case provides an illustration of how complexity theory has the potential to address challenges at the micro and the macro levels to the establishment of a new research field in psychology didactics and to indicate possible solutions (drawing among other things upon teaching experiences coming out of the Swedish case study). Psychology's high relevance to everyday life, multi-causality, perspective pluralism, dynamic systems character, and scientific character make complexity thinking a relevant approach in the consideration of challenges to the establishment of a research field in didactics of psychology.

Aims: The main purpose of the study was to investigate the relationship between participants’ state flow experience and the experience of the actual interactions with the other group members during a group based creative problem solving task (CPS-task) in relation to their creativity attitude and the produced results (i.e. the groups solution on CPS-task).Participants: Twelve groups of a total of sixty two participants (26 women, M=30.12; SD=10.22) took part in the experiment.Methods: This study was designed as an experiment, where the participants were requested to perform a problem solving task in groups, and to answer questionnaires regarding 1) subjects experience about their state flow in relation to the task performance (FSS-2, Jackson & Eklund, 2004), 2) participants experience of synchronized social interactions during the task assessed with the Flow Synchronization Scale, (FSyQ, Magyarófi & Oláh, 2015), and 3) subjects creativity attitude towards openness to novelty and flexible adaptation assessed with the Langer Mindfulness/Mindlessness Scale (MMS, Langer 1992; Haigh et al.2011).Results: We found that state flow positively associated with subjectively perceived synchronized interactions during the CPS-task. Higher state flow during the task associated with higher values on creativity attitude in the Mindfulness Scale but perceived synchronized interactions, such as effective cooperation and coordination with group members during the activity, associated with low creativity attitude (Mindlessness). In addition, the groups with more original solutions on the CPS-task had significantly higher values on the dimension of unambiguous feedback in FSS-2, compare to the groups who produced less original solutions rated by external experts.Conclusion: The presentation ends with a conceptual framework for studying group interactions, flow and creativity and suggestions for further research.

This volume provides updates and informs the reader about the development of the current empirical research on the flow experience. It opens up some new research questions at the frontiers of the field. The book offers an overview on the latest findings in flow research in several fields such as social psychology, neuropsychology, performing arts and sport, education, work and everyday experiences. It integrates the latest knowledge on experimental studies of optimal experience with the theoretical foundation of psychological flow that was laid down in the last decades.

The purpose of the study is to explore a new research methodology that will improve our understanding of "flow" through indicators of physiological and qualitative state. We examine indicators of "flow" experienced by musicians of a youth string quartet, two women (25, 29) and two men (23, 24). Electrocardiogram (ECG) equipment was used to record heart rate variability (HRV) data throughout the four movements in one and the same quartet performed during two concerts. Individual physiological indicators of flow were supplemented by assessments of group "state flow" (means from standardized questionnaires) and a group interview in which the musicians provided qualitative data. A matrix was constructed for the characterization of different kinds of demands in the written music in each one of the four movements for each one of the musicians. HRV derived from ECG data showed non-significant trends for group state flow across the eight musical episodes. Individual-level analysis showed that compared to the other players the first violin player had the highest mean heart rate and the lowest increase in high frequency (HF) power in HRV during this particular movement, particularly during the second concert. The qualitative data illustrated how an interplay of synchronized social interactions between this player and their colleagues during the musical performance was associated with a feeling of group state flow and served to support the first violinist. The case illustrates that the proposed mixed methodology drawing on physiological and qualitative data, has the potential to provide meaningful information about experiences of a flow state, both at individual and group levels. Applications in future research are possible.

A common approach to study emotional reactions to music is to attempt to obtain direct linksbetween musical surface features such as tempo and a listener’s response. However, such an analysisultimately fails to explain why emotions are aroused in the listener. In this article, we propose analternative approach, which seeks to explain musical emotions in terms of a set of underlyingmechanisms that are activated by different types of information in musical events. We illustrate thisapproach by reporting a listening experiment, which manipulated a piece of music to activate fourmechanisms: brain stem reflex; emotional contagion; episodic memory; and musical expectancy. Themusical excerpts were played to 20 listeners, who were asked to rate their felt emotions on 12 scales.Pulse rate, skin conductance, and facial expressions were also measured. Results indicated thattarget mechanisms were activated and aroused emotions largely as predicted by a multi-mechanismframework.

Keywords: affect, expectancy, listening, psychophysiology, theory

It has been the matter of much debate whether perceivers are able to distinguish spontaneous vocal expressions of emotion from posed vocal expressions(e.g., emotion portrayals). In this experiment, we show that such discrimination can be manifested in the autonomic arousal of listeners during implicitprocessing of vocal emotions. Participants (N = 21, age: 20–55 years) listened to two consecutive blocks of brief voice clips and judged the gender of thespeaker in each clip, while we recorded three measures of sympathetic arousal of the autonomic nervous system (skin conductance level, mean arterialblood pressure, pulse rate). Unbeknownst to the listeners, the blocks consisted of two types of emotional speech: spontaneous and posed clips. Aspredicted, spontaneous clips yielded higher arousal levels than posed clips, suggesting that listeners implicitly distinguished between the two kinds ofexpression, even in the absence of any requirement to retrieve emotional information from the voice. We discuss the results with regard to theories ofemotional contagion and the use of posed stimuli in studies of emotions.

Emotional expression is crucial for social interaction. Yet researchers disagree about whether nonverbal expressions truly reflect felt emotions and whether they convey discrete emotions to perceivers in everyday life. In the present study, 384 clips of vocal expression recorded in a field setting were rated by the speakers themselves and by naive listeners with regard to their emotional contents. Results suggested that most expressions in everyday life are reflective of felt emotions in speakers. Seventy-three percent of the voice clips involved moderate to high emotion intensity. Speaker-listener agreement concerning expressed emotions was 5 times higher than would be expected from chance alone, and agreement was significantly higher for voice clips with high emotion intensity than for clips with low intensity. Acoustic analysis of the clips revealed emotion-specific patterns of voice cues. "Mixed emotions" occurred in 41% of the clips. Such expressions were typically interpreted by listeners as conveying one or the other of the two felt emotions. Mixed emotions were rarely recognized as such. The results are discussed regarding their implications for the domain of emotional expression in general, and vocal expression in particular.

This paper investigates the effects of a music listening intervention on sleep quality in young participants with normal sleep. Recent studies show that relaxing classical music is an effective intervention to reduce sleep problems. The question arises, if such an intervention might have side effects on people who are not faced with sleep difficulties at first instance. We hypothesized that listening to relaxing classical music has an effect (either positive or negative) on the sleep quality of normal sleepers. To test this hypothesis we conducted a randomized control trial (RCT). Ten students (age 20 to 29 years) without sleep complaints listened to relaxing classical music at bedtime for three weeks for 45 minutes. Participants in the control group (n = 10) received no intervention. Sleep quality was measured at four times using the Pittsburg Sleep Quality Index (PSQI) before the study and weekly during the intervention period. To analyse the data, a two-way repeated measures ANOVA was calculated. Results did not reveal a statistically significant interaction between TIME and GROUP. Post-hoc comparisons showed that music listening has no influence on sleep quality at any given measuring time. However, the lack of significant effects may also be due to a type II error. Together with previous findings, we conclude that no adverse or side effects accompany the previously reported benefits of this music listening intervention. Further studies are needed to investigate the impact of music characteristics, musical preferences of participants and possible side effects of the intervention in different populations.

A growing number of studies suggest that flow experience is associated with life satisfaction, eudaimonic well-being, and the perceived strength of one's social and place identity. However, little research has placed emphasis on flow and its relations with negative experiences such as anxiety. The current study investigated the relations between flow and anxiety by considering the roles of self-esteem and academic self-efficacy. The study sample included 590 Chinese university students, who were asked to complete a self-report questionnaire on flow, anxiety, self-esteem, and academic self-efficacy. Data were analyzed using structural equation modeling (SEM) with AMOS software, in which both factorial analysis and path analysis were performed. Results revealed that the experience of flow negatively predicted anxiety, and both self-esteem and academic self-efficacy fully mediated the path between flow and anxiety. Specifically, self-esteem played a crucial and complete mediating role in this relationship, while academic self-efficacy mediated the path between self-esteem and anxiety. Our findings enrich the literature on flow experience and help with identifying practical considerations for buffering anxiety and more broadly with fostering strategies for promoting psychological sustainability and resilience.

A central part of singing includes learning new pieces of vocal music. Learning a new song is a complex task that involves several functions and modalities, such as memory functions, language and motor skills, and auditory and visual perception. Memory functions are a well-studied area, but it is unknown how memory theories apply to a multimodal activity such as singing. In this study, an attempt is made to translate the theories to the applied field of singing. This study aims to investigate the effectiveness of three types of learning formats for learning new song lyrics: auditory learning with image support (AI), auditory learning with text support (AT), and auditory learning only (A). Ninety-five participants were randomly assigned to one of the three experimental conditions. A univariate analysis of variance revealed a significant effect of condition on the lyric recall score and post-hoc tests showed that participants performed significantly better in the AI condition in comparison to both the AT and the A condition. No significant difference was found between AT and A. This study sheds light on how memory processes might work in learning song lyrics. Practical implications for practitioners such as music educators, conductors, and choir singers are discussed.

Research on group creativity needs to develop methods that capture data at a group level in different ways. This pilot study uses newly validated tools in an experimental design and primary statistical processing and analysis of data in order to investigate whether the design and the tools are appropriate for a full-scale experiment. The psychological experience called Flow is operationalized as an expression of creativity at the group level (Team flow) that may occur during the performance of challenging activities in which all participating team members are completely involved in their common activity, and are working together intuitively and synergistically towards the common purpose and enhance team’s effectiveness, productivity and performance. This paper focuses on team members’ motivation and learning, engagement, concentration, experience of synchronization and coordination during a group based problem solving task and also test how these dimensions of the group flow experiences relates to individual state flow experiences. 

Flow is a gratifying state of deep involvement and absorption that individuals report when facing a challenging activity and they perceive adequate abilities to cope with it (EFRN, 2014). The flow concept was introduced by Csikszentmihalyi in 1975, and interest in flow research is growing. However, to our best knowledge, no scoping review exists that takes a systematic look at studies on flow which were published between the years 2000 and 2016. Overall, 252 studies have been included in this review. Our review (1) provides a framework to cluster flow research, (2) gives a systematic overview about existing studies and their findings, and (3) provides an overview about implications for future research. The provided framework consists of three levels of flow research. In the first “Individual” level are the categories for personality, motivation, physiology, emotion, cognition, and behavior. The second “Contextual” level contains the categories for contextual and interindividual factors and the third “Cultural” level contains cultural factors that relate to flow. Using our framework, we systematically present the findings for each category. While flow research has made progress in understanding flow, in the future, more experimental and longitudinal studies are needed to gain deeper insights into the causal structure of flow and its antecedents and consequences.

Through the lens of social identity theory, this work aims to investigate the impact of servant leadership on employee resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic and to explore their underlying mechanisms through two types of social identity: organizational identification and professional identity. To test our hypotheses, an online survey was conducted via a large number of 703 employees working in public organizations in southwest China. Results yielded from the structural equation modeling analysis via AMOS (24.0) indicated that the effect of servant leadership on employee resilience was fully mediated by organizational identification and professional identity, respectively. Besides, the association between servant leadership and employee resilience was sequentially mediated from organizational identification to professional identity, and from professional identity to organizational identification. This study provides the first evidence of the predictive effect of servant leadership on employee resilience through organizational identification and professional identity, highlighting the significance of social identity for building and maintaining employees' resilience in coping with challenges posed by COVID-19.

Purpose

The Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index is used to evaluate subjective sleep quality, and it is commonly used in clinical research. Subjective sleep quality is also an important clinical measure in patients with psychiatric disorders. The aim of the present study was to evaluate the reliability and validity of the Hungarian version of the Pittsburgh Sleep Quality Index (PSQI-HUN) in both clinical and non-clinical samples.

Methods

The original version of PSQI was translated into Hungarian according to standard guidelines. The PSQI-HUN and the Athens Insomnia Scale (AIS) were subsequently administered to 53 psychiatric patients (schizophrenia, recurrent depressive disorder, mixed anxiety, and depressive disorder) and 178 healthy controls.

Results

Internal consistency as measured by Cronbach’s alpha in the whole sample was 0.79. Pearson’s product-moment correlations between component scores and the global scores were high (0.59–0.88) in the PSQI-HUN indicating the homogeneity of the scale. PSQI-HUN global and component scores differed significantly between psychiatric patients and control subjects. In the psychiatric patient subsample, schizophrenics had lower global scores compared to the other two patient groups. The analysis of convergent validity showed significant correlations between the AIS and the global as well as the component scores of the PSQI-HUN (except the component of sleep latency).

Conclusions

The present study concludes that the PSQI-HUN is a reliable, valid, and standardized measure for assessment of the subjective sleep quality in clinical and research settings.

To what extent do childhood experiences of music practice influence thinking about music later in life? In this contribution, 27–54-year-old monozygotic twins discordant with regard to piano playing in life were interviewed about music experiences during childhood and adult years. Recordings of heart rate variability were performed continuously during the interviews which were done separately with playing and nonplaying cotwins. Random factors had determined whether the twin chose to play or not. The rationale behind using monozygotic twins was that this offered a possibility to account totally for genetic influence. The physiological recordings in general showed small intrapair differences. However, during the initial discussion about how the difference arose in piano practice during childhood, the nonplaying twin used more time and showed evidence of a stronger sympathetic activation than the cotwin. These findings are discussed against the background of music's importance in childhood.

Earlier studies suggest that individual differences in fl ow experiencesdepend on both situational variables, e.g. the environmental opportunities to engagein fl ow promoting activities, and personal traits. Here, we present results of phenotypicanalyses of associations between fl ow proneness and fi ve major modalities ofindividual differences, i.e. personality, cognitive abilities, motivation, emotionalcompetence (alexithymia) and performance on chronometric tasks. The data wascollected using self-report questionnaires in a cohort of more than 10,000 Swedishtwin individuals. The aim of the study was partly exploratory, but we also addressedthree specifi c hypotheses suggested by earlier literature, i.e. that fl ow proneness is(i) correlated with personality, specifi cally with traits refl ecting emotional stability(low neuroticism) and conscientiousness; (ii) unrelated to cognitive ability; and (iii)correlated with trait intrinsic motivation. The results confi rmed all three hypotheses.Additional main fi ndings were that fl ow proneness is related to extraversion, agreeableness,openness to experience, low schizotypy, and emotional competence (lowalexithymia). Sex differences in fl ow proneness were mostly negligible, but fl owproneness increased weakly with age. In summary, individual differences in fl owproneness show substantial relations to personality related traits but appear essentiallyindependent of cognitive abilities. We conclude that the results taken togethersupport the notion of fl ow proneness being related to an autotelic personality, anddiscuss the potential implication of relations between the observed correlates offl ow proneness and outcomes related to health and well-being.

The present study investigated a conceptual model by testing flow experience and subjective well-being of university students during Coronavirus Diseas-19 (COVID-19) via considering their underlying mechanisms of academic self-efficacy and self-esteem. A total of 1,109 Chinese university students completed a questionnaire containing scales of subjective well-being, flow, academic self-efficacy, and self-esteem. Results yielded from the structural equation modeling analysis indicated a significant and positive association between flow experience and subjective well-being, and such an association was sequentially mediated by academic self-efficacy and self-esteem. Findings also provided empirical evidence for the proposed model highlighting the significant role of flow experience at the higher educational context in predicting subjective well-being of Chinese university students, and how such a relation can be supported by suggested mediating roles academic self-efficacy and self-esteem played.