Intrinsic Motivation and Flow

From the beginning of his work as a researcher, Heinz Heckhausen was interested in activities that are performed for their own sake and not only for some rewarding consequences-later addressed with the term "intrinsic motivation." One of his conceptual contributions to this area was the systematization of the bewildering heterogeneity of differentiations between various concepts of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. In the conception, he himself preferred, intrinsic motivation could include incentives of actions outcome if the goal is thematically identical with the action. Doing so the per se goal directed achievement motivation could be understood as intrinsically motivated. This understanding of achievement motivation was productively utilized in educational psychology. His interest in intrinsic motivation stimulated research on activity specific incentives. One of these incentives is the total emergence with a smooth-running activity-an incentive Csikszentmihalyi had already described as "flow experience."