Randomized controlled trials of self-monitoring interventions with or without incentives for diet and exercise among individuals with overweight or obesity: Psychological and behavioural effects.

Objectives: To test the effects of three behavioural interventions (daily monetary incentives + self-monitoring, delayed lump sum monetary incentives + self-monitoring, and self-monitoring only) on psychological constructs and fruit and vegetable consumption or physical activity behaviour change among a sample of adults with overweight or obesity.

Design: A pair of 3-arm longitudinal randomized controlled trials compared daily monetary incentives + self-monitoring, delayed lump sum monetary incentives + self-monitoring, and self-monitoring only interventions for either fruit and vegetable consumption or physical activity.

Methods: Individuals reporting elevated weight status and insufficient engagement in one of the target behaviours were randomly assigned to one of three 3-week interventions.

Stress and number of servings of fruit and vegetables consumed: Buffering effects of monetary incentives.

Diet is a key factor of human health, and additional research is needed in order to understand the psychological causes, consequences, and moderators of dietary behavior. Participants in two studies in the United States completed a 21-day intervention that involved either self-monitoring their fruit and vegetable consumption or self-monitoring combined with earning monetary incentives for behavior. Each day, participants reported their stress, affect, and consumption of fruits and vegetables.

Feel good now or regret it later? The respective roles of affective attitudes and anticipated affective reactions for explaining health-promoting and health risk behavioral intentions.

Evidence supporting the incorporation of affective constructs, such as affective attitudes and anticipated regret, into theoretical models of health behavior has been mounting in recent years; however, the role of positive anticipated affective reactions (e.g., pride) has been largely unexplored.

Neural activation during delay discounting is associated with 6-month change in risky sexual behavior in adolescents.

Background: Identifying cognitive and neural mechanisms of decision making in adolescence can enhance understanding of, and interventions to reduce, risky health behaviors in adolescence. Delay discounting, or the propensity to discount the magnitude of temporally distal rewards, has been associated with diverse health risk behaviors, including risky sex. This cognitive process involves recruitment of reward and cognitive control brain regions, which develop on different trajectories in adolescence and are also implicated in real-world risky decision making.

Body mass index, diet, and exercise: testing possible linkages to breast cancer risk via DNA methylation.

Purpose: To examine DNA methylation as a mechanism linking diet, physical activity, weight status, and breast cancer risk.

Methods: Insufficiently active women of varying weight status, without a history of cancer, completed a maximal exercise test, clinical measurement of height and weight, and a dietary intake measure. They also provided blood samples, which were analyzed to ascertain average methylation of candidate genes related to breast cancer (BRCA1, RUNX3, GALNT9, and PAX6) and inflammation (TLR4 and TLR6).

Body mass is positively associated with neural response to sweet taste, but not alcohol, among drinkers.

Obesity is a large and growing public health concern, presenting enormous economic and health costs to individuals and society. A burgeoning literature demonstrates that overweight and obese individuals display different neural processing of rewarding stimuli, including caloric substances, as compared to healthy weight individuals. However, much extant research on the neurobiology of obesity has focused on addiction models, without highlighting potentially separable neural underpinnings of caloric intake versus substance use.

Monetary Incentive Interventions Can Enhance Psychological Factors Related to Fruit and Vegetable Consumption.

Background: Incentive interventions have gained popularity to motivate health behavior change, but some psychological theorists caution that they may have deleterious effects on factors that potentiate behavior maintenance. Importantly, no empirical study has tested whether incentives indeed have iatrogenic effects on key psychological constructs associated with health behavior change and maintenance.

Purpose: The study aims to explore the effects of monetary incentives on theoretically informed psychological constructs and fruit and vegetable consumption.

Moving beyond the trait conceptualization of self-esteem: the prospective effect of impulsiveness, coping, and risky behavior engagement.

Past research has largely focused on examining self-esteem as an independent as opposed to a dependent variable. At the same time, research suggests that during adolescence, self-esteem is subject to yearly, monthly, as well as daily change, and consequently, it is important to identify underlying vulnerability factors and behaviors, which shape self-esteem lability. In the current multi-wave, longitudinal study, 142 adolescents between the ages of 12-18 completed monthly assessments across 4 months.

Insecure attachment as a predictor of depressive and anxious symptomology.

Background: Most studies have shown that insecure attachment and stress are important risk factors in the development of depression and anxiety. However, it is unclear whether distinct patterns of insecure attachment may relate differently to depression and anxiety following stressful events. Thus, the current study examined whether anxious and avoidant attachment, both of which are operationalized as insecure attachment, predict depressive and anxious symptoms following the occurrence of hassles.