Measuring individual and group flow in collaborative improvisational dance.

Flow is a state of being fully absorbed and experiencing feelings of energised focus, deep involvement, and success in the process of doing things. Flow plays a vital role in innovation and creativity, as all such processes require high intrinsic motivation to break through to a new level of complexity of thoughts and ideas, while the social environment rarely provides sufficient extrinsic rewards to motivate people to extensive creative work. Meanwhile, the vast majority of creative activities have a primarily social character: e.g. theatre making, music, and dancing. Thus, group flow became central in group creativity research. Group flow shares many aspects with individual flow, but inevitably has differences, due to its collaborative nature. In this study, we compare individual and group flow in dance improvisation, to explore the cognitive processes and strategies underlying group improvisation and their relation to flow experience; in particular, those that might support the aspects of group flow that are dependent upon understanding the other group members’ states and intentions. To assess flow experience, we used a video-stimulated recall method, Flow (Łucznik, Loesche, 2017), which allowed participants to mark on the video-recording of the activity those moments when they remembered experiencing flow. We identified group flow as the moments when then the majority of a group declared themselves as being in flow. This dataset consists of the data and analysis used in the 'Measuring individual and group flow in collaborative improvisational dance.' article (in press).