Making Your Life A Lot Easier By using DZNeP Understanding

MS is sponsored by the James McDonnell Foundation 21st Century Science Initiative in Understanding Human Cognition��Scholar Award. Supplementary material The Supplementary Material for this article can be found online at: http://journal.frontiersin.org/article/10.3389/fpsyg.2015.00908 Click here for additional data file.(132K, PDF)""Take Il Volo, the popular trio of Italian pop-opera singers, who won the top prize at the Sanremo Music Festival in 2015. They begin to sing, and each of them seems to know exactly what to do and when to do it. Everything flows easily even though the piece of music is clearly difficult to perform. Now think of a time when you were involved in singing or playing an instrument, or simply in listening to music. You will probably remember that time seemed to stop or to accelerate; you were totally concentrated on the music; everything flowed easily and you felt a sense of joy and fulfillment. Even though not all the above-mentioned conditions are always experienced by all people in every circumstance, when some of them occur, we experience a feeling similar to happiness. Within the paradigm of Positive Psychology (for a review, see Ryan and Deci, 2001), which emphasizes the role of well-being in human life, the above-mentioned feelings are considered crucial elements to promote well-being both in terms of satisfaction regarding life, presence of positive moods (i.e., subjective well-being; Diener et al., 1999) and self- actualization (i.e., psychological well-being; Ryan and Deci, 2000). Csikszentmihalyi (1975), in the course of interviewing people engaged in pleasurable and intrinsically-motivating activities and trying to understand the resulting unique experience, discovered the existence of a multidimensional phenomenon called ��flow.�� He described flow as ��the holistic sensation that people feel when they act with total involvement�� (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975, p. 36) and noted that it was characterized by a strong correlation with well-being (Delle Fave et al., 2011). To explain further, flow experience (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975, 1990) is a state of full engagement, control, concentration and action awareness, occurring Carboplatin during an activity perceived as highly self-rewarding and characterized by clear goals, unambiguous feedback, distortion of time perception, loss of self-consciousness and a balance between challenges and skills required to best perform it. These characteristics of flow are also the nine dimensions this experience is composed of (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975). Moreover, Csikszentmihalyi (1990, 1993) found out that artists and athletes seemed more likely to experience flow, especially during their work. In light of this premise, this concept has been studied mainly in three settings: sports (Muzio et al., 2012; Swann et al., 2012), work (Csikszentmihalyi and Csikszentmihalyi, 1992; Nakamura and Csikszentmihalyi, 2009), and music (O��Neill, 1999; MacDonald et al.