Unit 3 Behavior Change Analysis

Dr. Ogden’s Unit 3 “Behavior Change,” (2017) discussed some of the ways in which behavior can be changed using the four main theoretical perspectives. The four main theoretical perspectives are: learning theory (with added cognitions), social cognition theory and use of planning, using motivational interviewing to move people through the stages of change and using emotion in a positive way by using visual images. In this week’s readings, I learned about models of influencing behavior change, which include financial incentives and the use of mass media. The learning theory (with added cognition) which is one of the four main theories informing behavior change implies that any behavior is learned through three main mechanisms which are; modeling

Health promotion campaigners believed that fear was the best way to change behavior. Health promotion campaigners used the fear appeal approach. Ogden, J. (2017) in Unit 3: Behavior Change, stated “evidence indicates that these fear appeals were not very effective and that either too much or too little fear caused people to ignore this information.” When people are frightened, they block the messages since they generate a gap between how they consider themselves and how they are acting which challenges their sense of integrity. Blocking the message is accomplished by condescending the message, questioning the source or even the messenger. The solutions to the issue of message blocking are: to identify the perfect moderate amount of fear to use, to use images instead of just texts since visual imagery is more difficult to block than text alone, and to provide self affirmation or encourage gratitude to the person before providing the negative message. Self-affirmation is a process by which people are asked to reflect good things about themselves. Gratitude interventions persuade people to focus on the good areas in their life that they can feel grateful for. People feel better once they are feeling more grateful or self-affirmed and therefore, they feel less threatened by messages that tell them to change their

Financial incentives have been suggested as a method to endorse healthy behavior change. The article described how many studies focused on smoking cessation. Cash rewards and/or vouchers to purchase a range of goods or services were offered to the subjects who participated in the studies with the outcome of successful behavior change. This article strengthened my opinion that financial incentives support behavior change. Furthermore, the article titled “Use of mass media campaigns to change health behavior,” by Wakefield et al., (2010) described how mass media campaigns change population health behaviors. The article provided visual images from a television advertisement in Australia’s National Tobacco Campaign to explain how smoking is graphically linked to arterial damage. The graphic images as well as the text used in the campaign were associated with a decline in adult smoking rates in