CHAPTER PLAN
Human beings are, above all, adaptable. Climatic and ecological shifts in the Rift Valley
in East Africa some 2 million years created natural selection pressures resulting in the
evolution of our reprogrammable brains (Maslin and Christensen, 2007; Shultz and
Maslin, 2013). Consisting of approximately 86 billion neurons, the human brain has
the capacity, over time, to rewrite the regulatory processes that direct our cognitions,
emotions and behaviour patterns (Herculano-Houzel, 2009; Doidge, 2007). As we
practise new skills, form new relationships and develop new routines we re-programme
ourselves so altering what we are able and likely to do in the future. The challenge
for psychologists is to model the dynamism of cognitive, emotional and behavioural
change (Reynolds and Branscombe, 2015).
In this chapter we consider how an understanding of regulatory processes can
help us design and evaluate behaviour change interventions that may promote public
health. We will see how experimental testing of precisely defined change techniques
combined with systematic intervention design can be combined to create interven -
tions that have the potential to improve everyday health promotion and health care.
The chapter is presented in ten sections: (1) behaviour change and public health;
(2) a framework for designing behaviour change interventions; (3) regulatory processes
operating at different levels; (4) dual process models of intra-personal regulatory pro -
cesses; (5) information, motivation and behavioural skills; (6) information and threat
messages; (7) changing impulsive processes; (8) from specification of change processes
to complex interventions; (9) evaluation of behaviour change interventions; and (10)
taxonomies of intervention content characteristics and evidence of effectiveness from
data syntheses.
Chapter 9 Changing behaviour
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