Presence, flow, and narrative absorption questionnaires: a scoping review

This is a review and analysis of the questionnaires most used in empirical research about psychological phenomena labelled as “presence,” “flow,” and “narrative absorption,” mostly for experiences mediated by technology (printed books, screens for games and films, and virtual reality). The items of each questionnaire are categorized based on their wordings, thus independently from the conceptual models within which they have been developed. Overlapping concepts have been formulated in different fields according to specific disciplinary interests and based on knowledge within each field, this review focuses on how language is actually used in questionnaire items, rather than on how concepts are formulated top-down and arbitrarily associated with corresponding linguistic expressions that become items of a questionnaire. The goal is to highlight similarities and overlaps in order to show the aspects for which an interdisciplinary dialogue could bring concrete improvements to different research fields. Based on this categorization, various domains to which the items can be ascribed are identified (e.g. space, realism, agency, etc.) and psychological phenomena are linked to them (e.g. presence, social presence, narrative absorption, etc.). In the end, a synthetic selection of items is presented for each construct.