Can We Predict and Intervene to Improve Health Behaviours?
Dr Barbara Mullan, Senior Lecturer in Health Psychology from the University of Sydney and graduate of the UCD School of Psychology will give a lecture on the topic "Can We Predict and Intervene to Improve Health Behaviours?" in E114 in the Newman Building on Wednesday October 6th at 1.00 pm - All are welcome to attend.
Can we predict and intervene to improve health behaviours - Dr Barbara Mullan, Senior Lecturer in Health Psychology, University of Sydney.
It is estimated that 5.4 million Australians get sick annually from eating contaminated food and that up to 20% of this illness results from consumer food handling behaviour. Models that successfully predict behaviour can lead to creations of psychosocial interventions to improve food-safety knowledge, attitudes and behaviours. Research which has extended the Theory of Planned Behaviour will be outlined e.g. the role of habit as distinct from past behaviour, (Harris & Mullan, 2009) and research investigated the role of self regulation (Fulham & Mullan, 2009). Based on a detailed theoretical frame work a number of experiments to improve food hygiene will be explored. Delf regulation was unsecessful in the prediction of safe food handling so the aim of the 2nd part of my research to apply different Executive Functioning to a number of different health behaviours. Three longitudinal studies were conducted, investigating sleep hygiene, breakfast consumption, and dietary behaviours. Planning and response inhibition were tested. TPB data were obtained via online questionnaires and EF data were obtained via computerised neurocognitive tasks. The TPB successfully predicted all behaviours. However while measures of EF predicted additional variance in both sleep hygiene and breakfast consumption they did not predict any additional variance in either safe food handling or dietary behaviours.