Motivational precursors to maintaining an active lifestyle across the lifespan are not well understood. Intrinsic experience and values can motivate activity engagement, but age-related change in resources and temporal horizons may moderate these effects. Flow (Csikszentmihalyi et al., 2005) is the phenomenological experience of complete absorption in an activity, which can engender engagement in the activity for its own sake. We explored how the purpose (communal or agentic) and context (social or individual) of an activity impact the Flow experience as a function of age. Across the lifespan, agentic activities produced a heightened Flow experience compared to communal activities, supporting the idea that Flow plays a lifelong role in the development and maintenance of mastery. However, Flow was disproportionately enhanced for communal activities with age, suggesting that social motives may increasingly contribute to the pleasures of activity engagement with progression through the adult lifespan.

在整个生命周期中维持积极生活方式的动机先驱尚不十分清楚。内在的经验和价值观可以激发活动的参与，但是与年龄相关的资源和时间范围的变化可能会减轻这些影响。流动（Csikszentmihalyi等人，2005）是一种活动完全吸收的现象学经验，可以出于自身的原因而参与该活动。我们探讨了活动的目的（公共或代理）和情境（社会或个人）如何影响Flow体验随年龄的变化。在整个生命周期中，与公共活动相比，代理活动产生了更高的Flow体验，从而支持Flow在掌握和发展方面起着终生作用的观点。然而，