ABSTRACT
This chapter concerns affective responses to a learning task like boredom and anxiety. It suggests that emotion can help us ‘navigate through’ boredom and anxiety and maintain a constant ‘flow’, to use Csikszentmihalyi’s famous concept that couches experience of ‘full-engagement’ in terms of an emotional state. Emotion is closely related to learning to the extent that it sharpens our perceptual abilities allowing us to focus on what is important. The suggestion that utilising conceptualised versions of emotion as way to force flow is in line with evidence showing that flow satisfies people psychological need for autonomy or freely endorsing people actions as opposed to feeling coerced by internal or external forces. The balance between task difficulty and skill can be further moderated by task structure and clarity of goals. Results show that participants in highly structured tasks report greater psychological involvement and flow.
