TABLE 1.

Flow operationalizations in the psychological literature from the past 5 years.

Flow operationalization	Source	Continuous or discrete?	Enjoyment included?1	Flow condition(s) included?
Flow Short Scale (Rheinberg et al., 2003) and related scales2	Baumann et al., 2016 Barros et al., 2018 Brom et al., 2017 Harris et al., 2017a, b Hermann and Vollmeyer, 2016 Schattke et al., 2014	Continuous	No	Yes (partly)
Four items from the absorption subscale of the Flow Short Scale	Rivkin et al., 2018	Continuous	No	No
Flow Short Scale with three additional items measuring “autotelic experience”	Rankin et al., 2019	Continuous	Yes	Yes (partly)
Flow State Scale (Jackson and Marsh, 1996) and related scales	Borovay et al., 2019 Beltrán et al., 2018 Forkosh and Drake, 2017 Harmat et al., 2015 Joo et al., 2015 Kaye et al., 2018 Marston et al., 2016	Continuous	Yes	Yes (partly)
As above	Kawabata and Evans, 2016	Discrete	Yes	Yes (partly)
17 of the 36 items in the Flow State Scale	Lin et al., 2019	Continuous	Yes	Yes (partly)
3 of 9 subscales from Flow State Scale	Matthews, 2015	Continuous	No	No
Core Flow Scale (Martin and Jackson, 2008)	Kocjan and Avsec, 2017	Continuous	Yes	No
“3-Channel” flow model (Csikszentmihalyi, 1975)	Huskey et al., 2018 Chen and Sun, 2016 Sun et al., 2017	Discrete	No	Yes (fully)
“Quadrant” flow model (Massimini and Carli, 1988)	Ilies et al., 2017 Sather et al., 2017	Discrete	No	Yes (fully)
Three items measuring interest, enjoyment, and absorption	Bricteux et al., 2017	Continuous	Yes	No
Three items measuring absorption	Vanwesenbeeck et al., 2016	Continuous	No	No
Ten items measuring interest, attention, and control	Cho, 2018	Continuous	Yes	No
Eight items intended to measure conditions and experience of flow	Wanzer et al., 2018	Continuous	Yes	Yes (partly)
Ps presented with description of flow and asked how much their own experience emulated it	Kennedy et al., 2014 Vuorre and Metcalfe, 2016	Continuous	Yes	No
Eight of nine items previously used by Hektner et al. (2007)	Kulkarni et al., 2016	Continuous	Yes	Yes (partly)
A 28 item flow scale (Chou and Ting, 2003)	Soutter and Hitchens, 2016	Continuous	Yes	No
Eleven items taken from Kwak et al. (2014).	Brailovskaia et al., 2018	Continuous	Yes	No
Flow Scale for Games (Kiili, 2006)	Hou, 2015	Continuous	Yes	Yes (partly)
Flow subscale of game engagement questionnaire (Poels et al., 2007)	Dixon et al., 2019	Continuous	No	No
Flow subscale of game engagement questionnaire (Brockmyer et al., 2009)	Smith et al., 2017	Continuous	Yes	No
Three questions prefaced by description of flow (Novak et al., 2000)	Rodríguez-Ardura and Meseguer-Artola, 2017	Continuous	No	No
An 8-item flow scale (Waterman et al., 2003)	Bonaiuto et al., 2016 Mao et al., 2016	Continuous	No	Yes (partly)
Flow questionnaire (Csikszentmihalyi and Csikszentmihalyi, 1988)	Lavoie and Main, 2019	Discrete	Yes	No

¹Operationalizations which included one or more items measuring “autotelic experience” (i.e. intrinsically motivating), but did not include items measuring “enjoyment” specifically, were nevertheless classified as having an enjoyment component, given that intrinsic motivation implies enjoyment. ²The meaning of “related scales”: We did not distinguish between long versus short versions of scales, nor did we distinguish between older versus newer versions of scales, nor did we distinguish between original versus translated versions of scales. They were all considered to be versions of the same scale and are not differentiated in the table.