PSY 225: Interventions for Health Behavior Change
Fridays, 9-11:50 am, 5461 Franz
Instructor: Traci Mann, Ph.D.
Office: 8441a Franz
Office Hours: Wednesdays, 2-3 pm
Class Format
This course is a graduate seminar. Undergraduates are accepted based on space constraints and
the satisfaction of certain prerequisites. Because this course is a seminar, its success is based on
both the efforts of your instructor and on the efforts of the participants: We will be learning
together. To help stack the deck toward a successful course, I am making discussion
participation and discussion leading worth a fairly large part of your grade.
Each week you will be responsible for reading the articles in the reader. There are usually three
articles per week, and I have made great efforts to make sure that the readings are not both too
long and too difficult. The reader is available at Course Reader Material at 1141 Westwood
Blvd (between Kinross and Lindbrook). The phone number there is 443-3303.
Class Participation
Part of your grade will be based on class participation. To prepare, you should carefully read
and be familiar with the assigned readings. You may also want to make a note of a few issues or
questions that you would like to discuss. To earn the maximum amount of points for
participation, you need not (indeed, you should not) dominate discussion. You merely need to
contribute to the discussion each session and help it move forward. While I strongly encourage
you to do all the readings, if for some reason you have not thoroughly read all the articles on a
particular week, you should not feel that you cannot add to the discussion. You can and you
should.
Leading Class Discussion
Each class member will be required to lead class discussion one time during the quarter (or two
times if enrollment is low). You will choose your session on the first day. Leading class
discussion is more difficult than most people realize. I encourage you to prepare thoroughly for
this role. First, consider how you want to organize class. Depending on the nature of the
readings, class might be ideally divided up into separate sections for each article, or in other
cases, the articles can all be discussed together. However you decide, you are in charge of the
clock, of keeping discussion on track, and of preventing ridiculous digressions and encouraging
useful ones. I’ll be there to help out, of course, and I won’t let anything awful happen.
I find it helpful if the leader starts with an overview that includes a summary of the readings.
Often in seminars people jump right to the critiquing and shredding of the readings before
everyone in the room is clearly up to speed on what the readings say. I encourage you to allot a
reasonable amount of time to just reviewing what the readings are arguing before opening the
floor for criticism. Once everyone is clear on what the readings say, you can move the
discussion to a few key questions or thoughts that you want the discussion to be structured
around. To get people talking (remember, the class meets at 9 am), you might want to start with a
discussion question that allows people to talk about their personal experiences. Then you can
move into the more technical issues.
Feel free to be creative. You may want to try to structure a discussion around solving a fairly
specific problem. The topics of this course lend themselves well to this type of discussion, in
which the goal is to design an experiment. For some topics it may even be possible for us to
collect some data on the spot.
It is often useful to prepare a handout with bullet points of discussion questions or topics. The
hand-out might also contain a summary of the readings. This could help structure discussion. If
you do prepare a handout, I will be happy to make copies of it for you the day before class.
You will be graded on your leadership of discussion. Don’t worry – I will be able to tell if you
did a good job, even if your classmates let you down by not having done the reading very
carefully. (But they won’t do that, right?)
Because I want you to take this responsibility seriously and to be creative, leading discussion
will be worth a rather large proportion of your course grade (see below).
Reaction Papers
Four of the ten weeks of the term you will be expected to turn in a short reaction paper on the
assigned readings from that week. You may choose which four weeks you will do this
assignment. Papers will be due at the beginning of class, and will not be accepted late. Each
paper should be approximately 2-3 pages, double-spaced. The purpose of these papers is
twofold: First, they should help you read the weekly assignments critically and thoroughly, and
second, they should help generate discussion. I will comment on the papers and grade them.
A reaction paper features your intellectual reaction to a topic covered in the course reader. A
"topic" can be a phenomenon, a theory, a concept, an experiment, and so forth. The ideal start is
to think about which issues in that week’s readings have grabbed, bothered, or puzzled you.
Once you have an idea for a topic, choose the type of paper you want to write. You may critique
an article you read; propose a new experiment that would clarify open questions; or apply issues
or comments from previous sessions to the current readings. You may start with your own
everyday observations and develop a theoretical analysis; or you may start with a theoretical
prediction and apply it to your own life. All papers should be short and to the point. So tell your
reader what you are planning to do in the first paragraph. Then, in the remaining two or three
pages, implement this plan. No matter what type of paper you choose to write, you must clearly
go beyond summarizing other people's thoughts. A mere summary of the reading material is
not acceptable.
Final Project
The class will do a final project together. The project is a writing project. As a group, we will
write a review paper of models of health behavior change, and we will analyze which models are
most appropriate and effective for which particular health behaviors, based on numerous criteria.
For some reason, there is no paper that reviews the models and tries to make sense of when each
model would be most effective. I want this paper to be a single definitive paper that finally puts
each model in its place and makes sense of the massive messy literature on this topic. Each
student in class will write a section of the larger paper. We will break this project down into
parts during the third week of class, and each member of class will be responsible for one part.
We will have deadlines for outlines and drafts of each section.
Grading
Your grade will be based on the following items:
1. Your final paper
30%
2. Your reaction papers
20% (4 papers @ 5% each)
3. Leading discussion
25%
4. Class participation
25%
Readings
1/12: Week 1: Overview
1/19: Week 2: Individual Models: Health Belief Model and Theory of Reasoned Action
Rosenstock (1990). The Health Belief Model: Explaining health behavior through expectancies. In
Glantz, K. (ed.) Health Behavior and Health Education: Theory, Research, and Practice. San
Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
Aiken, West, Woodward, Reno, & Reynolds (1994). Increasing screening mammography in
asymptomatic women: Evaluation of a second generation, theory-based program. Health
Psychology, 13, 526-538.
Fisher, Fisher, & Rye (1995). Understanding and promoting AIDS-preventive behavior: Insights from the
Theory of Reasoned Action. Health Psychology, 14, 255-264.
Sutton, McVey, & Glanz (1999). A comparative test of the Theory of Reasoned Action and the Theory of
Planned Behavior in the prediction of condom use intentions in a national sample of English
young people. Health Psychology, 18, 72-81.
1/26: Week 3: Social Cognitive Learning Models
Bandura (1998). Health promotion from the perspective of Social Cognitive theory. Psychology and
Health, 13, 623-649.
Kirby, Barth, Leland, & Fetro (1991). Reducing the risk: Impact of a new curriculum on sexual risktaking. Family Planning Perspectives, 23, 253-263.
Schwarzer (1999). Self-regulatory processes in the adoption and maintenance of health behaviors. The
role of optimism, goals, and threats. Journal of Health Psychology, 4, 115-128.
2/2: Week 4: Motivational Models
Fisher, Fisher, Misovich, Kimble, & Malloy (1996). Changing AIDS risk behavior: effects of an
intervention emphasizing AIDS risk reduction information, motivation, and behavioral skills in a
college student population. Health Psychology, 15, 114-123.
Sherman, Nelson, & Steele (2000). Do messages about health risks threaten the self? Increasing the
acceptance of threatening health messages via self-affirmation. Personality and Social
Psychology Bulletin, 26, 1046-1058.
Stone, Aronson, Crain, Winslow (1994). Inducing hypocrisy as a means of encouraging young adults to
use condoms. Personality & Social Psychology Bulletin, 20, 116-128
2/9: Week 5: Self-Regulation Models
Baumeister, Heatherton, & Tice (1994). Introduction: Self-regulation failure in social and theoretical
context. In Losing Control: How and Why People Fail at Self-Regulation. New York: Academic
Press.
Carver & Scheier (1982). Control Theory: A useful conceptual framework for personality-social, clinical,
and health psychology. Psychological Bulletin, 92, 111-135.
2/16: Week 6: Stage Models
Prochaska, DiClemente, & Norcross (1992). In search of how people change: Applications to addictive
behaviors. American Psychologist, 47, 1102-1114.
Catania, Kegeles, & Coates (1990). Towards an understanding of risk behavior: An AIDS Risk Reduction
Model (ARRM). Health Education Quarterly, 17, 53-72.
Peterson et al (1996). Evaluation of an HIV risk reduction intervention among African-American
homosexual and bisexual men. AIDS, 10, 319-325.
2/23: Week 7: Sociological Models
Friedman, DesJarlais, & Ward (1994). Social models for changing health-relevant behavior. In
DiClemente & Peterson (Eds.): Preventing AIDS: Theories and Methods of Behavioral
Intervention. NY: Plenum Press.
Kelly et al (1991). HIV risk behavior reduction following intervention with key opinion leaders of
population: An experimental analysis. American Journal of Public Health, 81, 168-171.
Hansen & Graham (1991). Preventing alcohol, marijuana, and cigarette use among adolescents: Peer
pressure resistance training versus establishing conservative norms. Preventive Medicine, 20,
414-430.
3/2: Week 8: Community-Level Interventions and Mass-Media Campaigns
Repucci, Woolard, & Fried (1999). Social, community, and preventive interventions. Annual Review of
Psychology, 50, 387-418.
Meyer, Nash, McAlister, Maccoby, & Farquhar (1980). Skills training in a cardiovascular health
education campaign. Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, 48, 129-142.
Leventhal, Safer, Cleary, & Gutmann (1980). Cardiovascular risk modification by community-based
programs for life-style change: Comments on the Stanford Study. Journal of Consulting and
Clinical Psychology, 48, 150-158.
Meyer, Maccoby, & Farquhar (1980). Reply to Kasl and Leventhal et al. Journal of Consulting and
Clinical Psychology, 48, 159-163.
3/9: Week 9: Failed Interventions
McCord (1978). A thirty-year follow-up of treatment effects. American Psychologist, 284-289.
Clayton, Cattarello, & Johnstone (1996). The effectiveness of Drug Abuse Resistance Education (Project
DARE): 5-year follow-up results. Preventive Medicine, 25, 307-318.
Lynam et al (1999). Project DARE: No effects at 10-year follow-up. Journal of Consulting and Clinical
Psychology, 67, 590-593.
3/16: Week 10: Unintended Consequences of Interventions
Finckenauer (1999). Scared straight and the panacea phenomenon. Selected sections, pp 19-22, 83-89.
Lewis (1983). Scared straight. Criminal Justice and Behavior, 10, 209-226.
Schulz & Hanusa (1978). Long-term effects of control and predictability-enhancing interventions:
Findings and ethical issues. Journal of Personality & Social Psychology, 36, 1194-1201
Mann et al (1997). Are two interventions worse than none? Joint primary and secondary prevention of
eating disorders in college females. Health Psychology, 16, 215-225.