Prevention and health promotion: decades of progress, new challenges, and an emerging agenda.

Daily habits (e.g., smoking, diet, and exercise) and their immediate consequences (e.g., obesity) confer risk for most of the major health problems in industrialized nations. Hence, determinants of these behaviors and their modifications have been central topics in health psychology. Considerable scientific and applied progress has been made, but the field faces important challenges and opportunities in the future. These challenges and opportunities include changes in demographics and patterns of health, the need for a more comprehensive model of the domain of health behavior and prevention, the need to integrate behavioral and psychosocial risk and resilience, the incorporation of new technologies, and addressing a variety of professional and economic barriers to the implementation of prevention in health care.     

Efficacy of teacher-implemented good behavior game despite low treatment integrity

The Good Behavior Game (GBG) is a well-documented group contingency designed to reduce disruptive behavior in classroom settings. However, few studies have evaluated the GBG with students who engage in severe problem behavior in alternative schools, and there are few demonstrations of training teachers in those settings to implement the GBG. In the current study, 3 teachers were trained to implement the GBG in a restrictive setting for students with histories of emotional and behavioral disorders and delinquency. The teachers used the GBG to produce substantial reductions in problem behavior despite low treatment integrity. Clinical implications and future directions for research are discussed.     

The Effects of Argument Quality and Involvement Type on Attitude Formation and Attitude Change: A Test of Dual‐Process and Social Judgment Predictions

Involvement has long been theoretically specified as a crucial factor determining the persuasive impact of messages. In social judgment theory, ego‐involvement makes people more resistant to persuasion, whereas in dual‐process models, high‐involvement people are susceptible to persuasion when argument quality is high. It is argued that these disparate predictions might be reconciled by either different involvement types (i.e., value relevant vs. outcome relevant) or different attitude modification processes (i.e., attitude change vs. attitude formation). An experiment (N = 684) varying topic, position advocated, outcome relevance, and argument quality tested these moderators. The data were consistent with existence of two different types of involvement, but none of the theoretical predictions were consistent with the data. Instead, a main effect for argument quality had the largest impact on attitude change. Regardless of value‐relevant involvement, outcome‐relevant involvement, and attitude modification process, participants were more persuaded by high‐ rather than low‐quality arguments, with boomerang effects observed for low‐quality arguments. These findings highlight the importance of sound message design in persuasion.