Background: There is an urgent need to find effective interventions that reduce young South African women's vulnerability to HIV, and pre-exposure prophylaxis (PrEP) is highly effective when taken consistently. As national programs in Africa launch PrEP programs for young women, it is critical to understand how to effectively create awareness, stimulate interest, and increase uptake of PrEP.
Methods: Behavior-centered design (BCD) guided the development of a PrEP social marketing campaign for young women.
Objective: To investigate associations between socioeconomic status (SES) indicators (education, job position, income, multidimensional index) and the genesis of chronic low back pain (CLBP).
Design: Longitudinal field study (baseline and 6-month follow-up).
Setting: Four medical clinics across Germany.
Background: In health research, indicators of socioeconomic status (SES) are often used interchangeably and often lack theoretical foundation. This makes it difficult to compare results from different studies and to explore the relationship between SES and health outcomes. To aid researchers in choosing appropriate indicators of SES, this article proposes and tests a theory-based selection of SES indicators using chronic back pain as a health outcome.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFIntroduction: The accurate measurement of behaviour is vitally important to many disciplines and practitioners of various kinds. While different methods have been used (such as observation, diaries, questionnaire), none are able to accurately monitor behaviour over the long term in the natural context of people's own lives. The aim of this work was therefore to develop and test a reliable system for unobtrusively monitoring various behaviours of multiple individuals within the same household over a period of several months.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Emotional eating (i.e., overeating in response to negative affect) is a commonly accepted explanation for eating behaviors that are not in line with personal eating-norms.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: The purpose of this review was to understand whether adding antimicrobial agents to hand hygiene products could increase the health benefits of handwashing with plain soap (HWWS) in low-income settings.
Methods: A review of experimental studies comparing the effects of HWWS with antimicrobial soap and waterless hand sanitizer on health and hand contamination in naturalistic conditions was conducted. In addition, an analysis was completed of the evidence from laboratory studies examining the factors that may affect the impact of antimicrobial soap, taking into account the conditions in low-income settings.
A particular form of social pain is invalidation. Therefore, this study (a) investigates whether patients with chronic low back pain experience invalidation, (b) if it has an influence on their pain, and (c) explores whether various social sources (e.g.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFWhereas hedonic consumption is often labeled as impulsive, findings from self-licensing research suggest that people sometimes rely on reasons to justify hedonic consumption. Although the concept of self-licensing assumes the involvement of reasoning processes, this has not been demonstrated explicitly. Two studies investigated whether people indeed rely on reasons to allow themselves a guilty pleasure.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFSelf-regulation failure is often explained as being overwhelmed by impulse. The present article proposes a novel pathway, presenting a theoretical framework and empirical review of a justification-based account of self-regulation failure. With justification we refer to making excuses for one's discrepant behavior, so that when experiencing a self-regulation dilemma between immediate impulses and long-term intentions, people resolve the conflict by developing and employing justifications that allow violations of the goal they endorse.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFUnlabelled: Research on emotions as a trigger for food intake has mainly been focused on the role of negative emotions. In the present studies the role of positive emotions as a trigger for food intake is investigated in a sample of healthy participants with a normal weight. Two laboratory studies were conducted in which positive emotions or no emotions were induced (Study 1) or in addition negative emotions were induced (Study 2) after which unhealthy food intake was assessed by bogus taste tests.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: While high levels of dietary restraint do not appear to reflect actual caloric restraint, it has been found to be a risk factor for a wide array of maladaptive eating patterns. These findings raise the question what, if not caloric restriction, dietary restraint entails. We propose that the very finding that restrained eaters do not eat less than they intend to do can provide an answer.
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