Yerkes-Dodson Law for Flow: A Study on the Role of Competition and Difficulty in the Achievement of Flow

Flow is the state of consciousness wherein one is completely absorbed in one's activities, to the exclusion of all other thoughts and feelings. Being an experience of energized focus, low anxiety, and total enjoyment, it is the point of perfect harmony within the mind. This study investigated the achievement of flow in competitive versus non-competitive situations and its interaction with task difficulty. The Yerkes-Dodson law suggests that performance on a task is influenced by the inverse interaction between competition and difficulty, and we predicted a similar pattern for flow. Thirty-two participants performed word search puzzle tasks manipulated on two levels of difficulty; completing them either under competitive conditions (where participants, in groups of four, were informed that they would be ranked against each other) or non-competitive conditions (where participants were simply instructed to perform the task to the best of their abilities). Supporting our hypothesis, results indicated an extremely significant interaction between competition and difficulty (p < .001); competitive conditions produce greater flow for easy tasks and non-competitive conditions for difficult tasks. However, on closer examination, we found gender differences in this interaction pattern while females adhered to this Yerkes-Dodson interaction, males showed greater flow for competitive tasks regardless of task difficulty. The implications of these findings enable educators to identify whether certain learning tasks are more conducive to competitive or non-competitive situations for the achievement of flow, depending on task difficulty and gender.