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Category: Project

Description: Providing individuals with personalized information about how a single behavior can affect their risk of developing multiple diseases in an easily understandable format may increase laypeople's ability to understand the importance of the behavior for their overall health, not just for one disease. However, there is a considerable gap between wanting to perform a behavior and actually achieving successful behavior change. The first part of this project sought to understand how to convey complex personalized risk information to the public (see https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0272989X20968070). The second part of this project sought to understand whether engaging in mental imagery-based self-regulation activities may increase physical activity behavior (see https://bpspsychub.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/bjhp.12558). All participants completed baseline activities for both parts of the study over a 1-hour time period and then were followed for 90 days. Projects that used secondary data analysis to examine additional research questions included (a) examining possible mechanisms driving rejection of personalized diabetes risk information (link to article forthcoming), and (b) identifying strategies for recruiting a socio-demographically diverse sample (link to article forthcoming).