Why do We Feel Mastery? An exploratory study on climbers regarding the concept of Mastery, informed by Flow and Functional Wellbeing.

Abstract

What experiences lead to feelings of mastery? This research’s function was to tease out more experiential factors that lend to feelings of mastery through the context of rock climbing. In this exploratory study, theories and research such as the Flow theory by Csikszentmihalyi, and the Functional Well-Being Approach by Joar Vittersø are reviewed in order to consider mastery in the wellbeing context. Climbing as an activity served a compelling setting to look into the dynamics at play. To further investigate the feelings of mastery, 38 climbers were recruited to describe their experience after climbing a rock route. A questionnaire was used to collect participants verbal reports, as well as demographic data. Additionally a “feelometer” allowed participants to illustrate their emotional experience during the climb in diagrams that we provided. Descriptive, correlational, and several multi-level analyses were used to examine the data, and granted a few noteworthy results: eudaimonic feelings of immersion during climbing significantly predict feelings of mastery, whereas hedonic feelings of pleasure have a direct negative effect on mastery. Additionally, factors such as on-line mastery and the level of climber experience influence the feeling of mastery. Results indicate that skills, or the balance between skills and challenge, have little explanatory power regarding the feelings of mastery. Mastery appears to originate, in part, as a consequence of diverse emotions that present themselves during an activity, as challenge increases. We found that while climbing can feel uncomfortable during the experience, the memory of it afterwards is pleasurable. Study results were inconsistent on the within- and between level of analyses, and call for future research. Results are additionally discussed with reference to the imbalance model of flow, memory bias and the issue of retrospectively self-reported emotions.