Health-related behavioural change—a test of a new model

Abstract

Numerous studies have demonstrated that planned health education and health promotion interventions are not particularly successful in bringing about behavioural change. It is suggested that the reasons for this are the fallacious theoretical assumptions underlying many intervention strategies and the failure to place sufficient emphasis on the context in which health-related behaviours occur. Studies of self-initiated behavioural change suggest that the antecedents of change are often events or processes which bring a previously routinised and unremarked behaviour into new focus.

This paper describes a preliminary test of a new model of behavioural change in which a group of lay people were recruited to act as paid interviewers on a food survey in their own area. The survey was particularly concerned with the consumption of high fibre foods. he and post-test measures of the interviewers' own food habits as compared with those of a control group indicated modest support for the proposed model. Implications of this study for health education and promotion are discussed.     

A “new rhetoric” for a “new dialectic”: Prolegomena to a responsible public argument

This essay offers, as a counterpart to pragma-dialectical argument, a “new rhetoric” produced in the situated discourse of a public forum when a community addresses matters of common urgency and undertakes informed action. Such a rhetoric takes the principles of discourse ethics as its informing dialectic by identifying an interlocutor as one who is obligatedboth to argue effectively,and also to hold open, even reinforce, norms of communicative reason. Implications concerning the study of fallacies and theethos obligations of communicative reasoning are discussed.     

The safe haven of a new classicism: the quest for a new aesthetics in Hungary 1904–1912

Seen through the quest for a new metaphysics, the visual arts were interpreted in the framework of the particular sense of progress that the generation of György Lukács developed in the first decade of the twentieth century. They saw Impressionism as the veritable symptom of the deficiencies of their age and dreamed of a great, solid, lasting new Hungarian culture which would transcend the fragmentariness, sociological interests, and ethereality of Impressionism. Although exhibitions of contemporary modernist art were organized in Budapest and the Nagybánya artists’ colony was in contact with the living French art, the nascent aesthetic theory, first of all that of Lukács, based the appreciation of Post-Impressionism on ideological considerations rather than the artistic particularities of the artists. Central to this aesthetic was the notion of greatness and a sense of metaphysics derived from German idealist philosophy and applied to the art of Cézanne, Gauguin, and the Budapest group The Seekers (founded in 1909, renamed, in 1911, as The Eight), all of whom were appreciated for features pointing in the direction of a new Classicism.     

Automaticity: a new framework for dyslexia research?

The performance of a group of 23 13-year-old dyslexic children was compared with that of same-age controls on a battery of tests of motor balance. A dual-task paradigm was used--subjects performed each test twice, once as a single task, and once as a dual task concurrently with a secondary task. Two alternative secondary tasks were used, the classic counting-backwards task and an auditory choice reaction task. Both secondary tasks were calibrated for each subject to ensure that their performance on the secondary task alone fell between pre-specified performance criteria. In all single-task conditions there was no difference between the performance of the two groups. By contrast, in 19 out of the 20 tests performed under dual-task conditions, the dyslexic group were significantly impaired, whereas the controls showed no impairment, thus resulting in significantly better performance by the control group than the dyslexic group. The sole exception was that the dyslexic children were not impaired on the easiest balance condition with the choice reaction task. Under the dual-task conditions the dyslexic children also performed worse than the controls on the secondary task. It is very hard to accommodate the findings within the traditional framework of a deficit specific to lexical skills. One plausible explanation of the results is that, unlike the controls, the dyslexic children need to invest significant conscious resources for monitoring balance, and thus their performance is adversely affected by any secondary task which serves to distract attention from the primary task. This need for "conscious compensation" suggests that for dyslexic children the skill of motor balance is poorly automatized. It is possible, therefore, that many of the reading deficits of dyslexic children are merely symptoms of a more general learning deficit--the failure to fully automatize skills.     

Post 2015: a new era of accountability?

The Millennium Development Goals (MDGs) were criticised for failing to address the issue of governance, and the associated notions of responsibility and accountability. The Sustainable Development Goals, we argue, need to recognise the structural constraints facing poor countries – the power imbalances in the global economic system that limit their ability to promote the prosperity and well-being of their people, as was clearly brought out by the Commission on Global Governance for Health, of which we were both members [Ottersen, O. P., J. Dasgupta, C. Blouin, Paulo Buss, Virasakdi Chongsuvivatwong, Julio Frenk, Sakiko Fukuda-Parr, et al. 2014. “The Political Origins of Health Inequality: Prospects for Change.” Lancet 383: 630–667]. This article is divided into three parts. We begin by making the case for a global justice perspective which emphasises the responsibility – and hence also accountability – of international organisations and rule-making bodies. We next demonstrate the limitations of accountability mechanisms of the type adopted in the MDGs. We conclude by arguing for a new approach to accountability that may be better suited to the post-2015 era.     

A new vision of a classical question: How to become a mother?

Abstract

This article offers a reflection on conception, pregnancy, and the first mother–infant relationships of mothers with motoric and sensory disabilities. Based on more than 13 years of experience with women with motoric and sensory disabilities who had a desire for a child, the author analyzes this unusual situation from three different points of view: the medical help to procreate, meeting a partner for the mother, and the link with the initial maternal family, i.e. the mother’s mother. The last part concerns the possibility of the development of a mother–infant relationship when bodily function is lacking.     

Humanism: a new bag of virtues for guidance?

The recent national concern over the failures of education has created a demand for new programs that will promote healthy psychological and personal growth. This article examines the present status of guidance theory and practice vis-à-vis humanistic education and suggests that the movement deliberately begs the question of values under the guise of promoting a new bag of virtues as educational objectives. It also discusses the need for a guidance theory based on a framework from developmental psychology rather than from theories of humanistic education.     

Re-work: a new Japanese support system for reinstatement

Re-work is a new treatment technique that follows the conventional Japanese approach, which includes rest and pharmacotherapy. The aim of re-work is to prevent repeated sick leave by helping individuals reflect on the reasons behind the sick leave and improve stress-related coping skills. Re-work participants prepare in an environment similar to their workplaces at a medical institution or a specialised public facility for several months before returning to work. As re-work is undertaken via group work, this has benefits beyond those which can be achieved by an individual alone. The reinstatement effects of re-work are now starting to be verified. Issues of interest for re-work include its unified concept-based programme, and the need to further verify its clinical efficacy and cost-effectiveness.     

Contract cheating: a new challenge for academic honesty?

‘Contract cheating’ has recently emerged as a form of academic dishonesty. It involves students contracting out their coursework to writers in order to submit the purchased assignments as their own work, usually via the internet. This form of cheating involves epistemic and ethical problems that are continuous with older forms of cheating, but which it also casts in a new form. It is a concern to educators because it is very difficult to detect, because it is arguably more fraudulent than some other forms of plagiarism, and because it appears to be connected to a range of systemic problems within modern higher education. This paper provides an overview of the information and literature thus far available on the topic, including its definition, the problems it involves, its causal factors, and the ways in which educators might respond. We argue that while contract cheating is a concern, some of the suggested responses are themselves problematic, and that best practice responses to the issue should avoid moral panic and remain focussed on supporting honest students and good academic practice.     

Emergence from brain architectures: a new cognitive science?

The way in which artificial intelligence has developed over the last 50 years has had a major role in shaping cognitive science as it is today. This has generated computational models of behaviour. The connectionist revival of the 1980s added a tinge of neurodynamics to this. Here I suggest that some post-connectionist work in artificial intelligence is turning towards an understanding and formalisation of the mechanisms of brain architectures which contribute to an emergence of cognition providing a closer link between brain mechanisms and experienced brain states. This even addresses the neurological basis of consciousness.     

Abusive relationships: Is a new category for traumatization needed?

The concept of a spectrum of posttraumatic disorders has been postulated by a variety of major contributors to the field of psychotraumatology. Although Posttraumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) is one trauma-based mental health disorder, there are other posttraumatic illnesses that do not qualify for PTSD, nor are they accurately described by other diagnostic categories in the DSM-IV. The present paper proposes and delineates a new syndrome, entitled Posttraumatic Relationship Syndrome (PTRS), which is a function of the experience of trauma in the context of an emotionally intimate relationship. It differs from PTSD in four fundamental ways: (1) the nature of the Stressor criterion; (2) the response to the Stressor; (3) the inclusion of a category of relational symptoms; and (4) the way of coping with the trauma (i.e., it lacks the emotional numbing and avoidance of stimuli associated with the trauma). The latter is the most salient difference as it involves a qualitatively different experience of the “world of trauma”-a primarily conscious experience in PTRS and an often unconscious experience in PTSD.     

Psychotherapy with transsexuals—do we need a new approach?

This paper details a 63-session therapy with a female-to-male trans-sexual. It illustrates the sexual conflict that lies behind the apparently conflict-free assertion that the patient is a man in a woman's body, as well as exploring the meanings of femaleness and maleness. It highlights the difference in our (the helping professions) reactions to transsexuals as opposed to other patients seen in psychotherapy, and suggests that reform is needed in the way that we conceptualize our role with these clients.     

Does personal intelligence exist? Evidence from a new ability-based measure

Personal intelligence has been defined as the ability to reason about personality and personality-relevant information and to use that information to guide one's actions and more generally, one's life. We constructed an initial version of an ability-based measure to test whether personal intelligence can be measured and whether it exists as a unitary intelligence. In 3 studies (N = 241, 308, and 385), we administered this Test of Personal Intelligence (TOPI), composed of 4 sections, to undergraduates along with criterion measures. Results suggested that a personal intelligence can be measured, that it might exist as a unified area of mental abilities, and that it represents psychological qualities that have intriguing predictive aspects.