Month: February 2016

Imagine a physician told you that you had a genetic predisposition for obesity. Would you
improve your diet and exercise in order to overcome your predisposition, or would you
decide to not even bother to change your behavior? An article published this year in Annals of Behavioral Medicine suggests that the answer to that question depends on your emotional state. Emotions influence how we interpret and react to information. In medical situations relating to chronic illness, emotions can run high.

In this experiment, researchers looked at the effects of negative emotions on beliefs about the causes of obesity and intentions to change diet and exercise after receiving messages delivered by an online, virtual physician. Participants included overweight women, who were randomized to one of six conditions that varied emotional states and information about the origins of obesity. Randomization is a method used to maximize similarity between groups and helps to rule-out existing differences in participants as an explanation for results.

Negative emotions were induced by asking participants to write about either a fear- or anger-inducing situation they experienced. This method of emotion induction is effective because the emotional situations are personally relevant to the participant. Those in the control condition wrote about a room in their house. Afterwards, participants watched videos of a virtual physician describing the origins of obesity as either genetic or behavioral. Finally, participants completed measures of their beliefs about the causes of obesity and their intentions to improve diet and exercise.

The women who heard the message about genetic predispositions for obesity reported lower intentions to change their diet and exercise, but only when they had written about a fear-inducing experience. For women who wrote about other experiences, the genetic message had no effect on their intentions to change.

The take away message from this study is that the combination of receiving genetic information from a physician while in a fearful state may uniquely lead to reduction of healthy diet and exercise behaviors. Fear can be a common emotion patients experience while interacting with physicians, and this fearful state can lead to unintended behavioral consequences after receiving medical information. Future directions include the need to determine how physicians can attend to patient emotions during encounters to improve behavioral outcomes.

Reference: Persky, S., Ferrer, R. A., & Klein, W. M. (2016). Genomic Information may Inhibit Weight-Related Behavior Change Inclinations Among Individuals in a Fear State. Annals of Behavioral Medicine, 1-8.

In 2006, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approved a vaccine for adolescent girls and young adult women that protects against the human papillomavirus (HPV) – a sexually transmitted virus that can cause several cancer types, including cervical cancer. In 2009, the FDA approved the vaccine for adolescent boys and young adult men.
The US government recommends an 80% vaccination rate by 2020, but current rates for the 3-dose series among US adolescents is well below this rate (39.7% for girls, 21.6% for boys), particularly among traditionally underserved adolescents seen in safety-net clinics (uninsured, low-income, and racial and ethnic minorities). Thus, low vaccination rates are an important public health issue.

In a paper our group recently published in the journal JMIR Research Protocols, we describe an innovative project designed to address the problem of suboptimal HPV vaccination rates in safety-net pediatric clinics. Self-persuasion, the process of generating one’s own arguments for engaging in a specific behavior, is an effective behavior change strategy. Moreover, it may be a particularly useful strategy for adolescent HPV vaccination because many parents of adolescents are undecided or ambivalent about the vaccine. Leveraging parents’ own arguments for the vaccine may help to address their indecision or ambivalence. However, it is not yet known how to develop and implement self-persuasion for HPV vaccination in a safety-net clinic setting.

In the paper, we describe the 3-stage project that is funded by the National Cancer Institute to develop and implement a self-persuasion intervention for adolescent HPV vaccination. In the intervention, we will use an iPad application we developed to help parents learn about HPV and the vaccine and to think about and verbalize their own reasons for why getting the vaccine is important. The three stages of the project all have a distinct purpose. In Stage 1, we have conducted formative studies to understand parents’ ability to generate their own arguments for HPV vaccination and to understand how parents and healthcare providers discuss the vaccine with one another. In Stage 2, we will conduct a randomized intervention to understand what aspects of self-persuasion (verbalization, choosing argument topics) are most effective and to identify the optimal approach to self-persuasion in this population. In Stage 3, we will conduct a pilot trial to establish the feasibility of using the iPad-based intervention before a clinic appointment and to determine its effect on parent-provider discussions about the vaccine.

This project is an excellent example of an integration of basic and applied behavioral science to address an important public health issue. From a basic science perspective, the project uses an effective behavior change approach in an innovative way. Plus, the findings from the study will add to our understanding which aspects of self-persuasion are most effective. From an applied science perspective, the project will result a feasible intervention that can be realistically implemented in pediatric clinics. This type of collaboration between basic and applied behavioral science is important to advancing our understanding of how best to address important health issues, like HPV vaccination.

Reference. Tiro, J.A., Lee, S.C., Marks, E.G., Persaud, D., Skinner, C.S., Street, R.L., Wiebe, D.J., Farrell, D., Bishop, W.P., Fuller, S., & Baldwin, A.S. (2016). Developing a tablet-based self-persuasion intervention promoting adolescent HPV vaccination: Protocol for a three-stage mixed-methods study. JMIR Research Protocols, 5, e19.

Most of us have tried tracking the foods we eat or used a FitBit in hopes of meeting our health goals. Have you wondered whether it was worth the trouble? Findings from a recent meta-analysis published in Psychological Bulletin suggest that it is.

Meta-analysis is a research methodology in which the findings from several studies on the same topic are combined and analyzed together. A well-conducted meta-analysis is considered the gold standard of evidence for an effect because idiosyncrasies that exist in any individual study that can affect its results are minimized when analyzing findings across studies. Thus, a meta-analysis provides a more precise and accurate estimate of an effect than any one study can.

In the recently published meta-analysis, researchers tested whether people who monitored their progress on goals were more likely to attain those goals. The studies included in the analysis covered a range of goals (e.g., weight loss, smoking cessation, physical activity, medication adherence, time management), although most were health related. The researchers also determined whether various factors influence the strength of the effect, such as whether the monitoring of goal progress is public (e.g., sharing step counts with friends via a social networking site) and whether it is physically recorded (e.g., using a smartphone). In addition, this meta-analysis is particularly valuable because the researchers only included experimental studies that randomly assigned participants to monitor goal progress or to a control group. Thus, the findings from this meta-analysis reflect how strongly monitoring goal progress actually has a causal effect on goal attainment – a critical piece to understanding the effect of monitoring goal progress.

The results of the meta-analysis included several interesting findings. First, goal monitoring interventions had strong effects on the frequency of progress monitoring, which led to consistent and reliable changes in goal attainment. Second, public monitoring and physically recording one’s progress both led to stronger effects on goal attainment. Third, the effect of goal monitoring was stronger when the focal behavior was the management of a specific medical condition (e.g., asthma, diabetes) compared to other health goals (e.g., weight loss, physical activity).

These findings are the most conclusive and definitive to date on the effect of goal monitoring progress. The findings clearly indicate that keeping track of the progress toward your goals will increase the likelihood you accomplish your goals. This is especially true if others can see your progress and you’re physically keeping track, like in a smartphone app. Moreover, the findings provide strong evidence to include goal monitoring as part of effective behavioral interventions aimed at changing behaviors such as physical activity.

Reference. Harkin, B., Webb, T. L., Chang, B. P., Prestwich, A., Conner, M., Kellar, I., Benn, Y., & Sheeran, P. (2016). Does monitoring goal progress promote goal attainment? A meta-analysis of the experimental evidence. Psychological Bulletin, 142, 198-229.