Fostering sustainable engagement with intangible cultural heritage: a flow theory perspective on Chaohua Wind and Percussion Music

This study integrates Flow Theory and Embodied Cognition to examine the transmission of Intangible Cultural Heritage (ICH), addressing the psychological distance between contemporary audiences and traditional cultural practices. A randomized experiment ( N = 150) compared text-image, audiovisual, and interactive instrumental-performance conditions. The interactive condition produced the highest Flow Experience and Experience Satisfaction, followed by the audiovisual and text-image conditions; Welch tests and Games-Howell comparisons confirmed this ordered pattern under unequal variances. Flow Experience and Experience Satisfaction were strongly associated in the pooled sample, but common-method and conceptual-overlap diagnostics indicated that this association contained substantial between-condition structure alongside residual within-condition covariation and was not uniform across conditions. For the two contrasts involving the Text-Image condition, significant treatment-by-Flow interactions required interaction-aware natural-effect decompositions: the total natural indirect effects excluded zero, whereas the pure natural indirect effects did not. The Audiovisual-versus-Interactive contrast retained a significant ordinary indirect effect. These results are consistent with Flow Experience functioning as a condition-dependent proximal psychological pathway rather than a uniform or causally identified mechanism. These findings inform the design of brief heritage experiences. Their implications for sustained participation require longitudinal and field-based evaluation.