Healthy lifestyle technologies (HLT) have gained popularity in young people's daily lives, but the long-term effect of these technologies on their physical activity (PA) participation and health learning is unclear. This systematic review (a) explores the effect of HLT use on the PA participation and health learning of young people (aged 13-18),…

Objective: To evaluate the change in tobacco use by college students in California during the COVID-19 pandemic. Participants: Young adults (18-24 years) currently enrolled in a California college or university (N = 212). Methods: Students recruited through social media posts and by student tobacco advocate members completed an online survey of 59…

New approaches are needed when working in rural communities to identify and communicate holistic evaluation impacts related to community-based health promotion efforts of Cooperative Extension. Specifically, there is a lack of recorded long-term programmatic impacts of these programs, including behavior changes related to consuming nutritious and…

Background: There is little understanding of men's weight loss outcomes and behaviors in self-directed contexts, such as digital commercial mobile weight management programs. This is an especially pressing question given that men often express disinterest in weight management programs and it is unknown how that manifests in self-directed…

Objective: Research suggests that college is a risky period for changes in eating behavior and beliefs. Although social health determinants relate to health behavior changes, research has not explored subjective social status, one's societal standing, in terms of eating expectancies among college students. The present study examined the emotion…

Background: Emotions are important in smoking-related communications, but the role of discrete positive and negative emotions in comparative risk messages about combusted and electronic cigarettes (e-cigarettes) is unclear. Method: In an online experiment, 1,202 U.S. adult current smokers or recent quitters were randomized to view one of six…

Background: Faith-based school physical activity (PA) interventions are uncommon. Process evaluations of school PA interventions, in general, rarely include student participant voices. Purpose: We interviewed a subset of participants in Physical Activity for Lent (PAL) -- a pedometer-based virtual journey that traces Jesus's life travels -- to…

More than 100 million people globally are estimated to be exposed to arsenic in drinking water that exceeds the World Health Organization guideline of 10 µg/L. In an effort to develop and test a low-cost sustainable approach for water arsenic testing in Bangladesh, we conducted a randomized controlled trial which found arsenic educational…

Aims: The use of fear appeals with disgusting graphical content is part of current practice in health campaigns. Previous studies have suggested both a detrimental and a beneficial effect of disgust in fear appeals on different types of outcome measures. We were interested in whether disgust in anti-smoking messages decreases or increases…

Although many interventions are effective for health behavior initiation, maintenance has proven elusive. Interventions targeting maintenance often extend the duration with which initiation content is delivered or the duration of follow-up without intervention. We posit that health behavior initiation and maintenance require separate psychological…

Two distinctly different denial-based threat orientations (avoidance denial and optimistic denial) were examined using a message about the future risk of cardiovascular disease (CVD) for young adults. Participants (N = 101) completed measures of denial-based dispositional threat orientations, current eating, comparative risk, and objective risk…

Objective: To examine how norm appeals and guilt influence smokers' behavioural intention. Design: Quasi-experimental design. Setting: South Korea. Method: Two hundred and fifty-five male smokers were randomly assigned to descriptive, injunctive, or subjective anti-smoking norm messages. After they viewed the norm messages, their norm perceptions,…

In the Winter 2013 issue of "Independent School," Richard Barbieri considered some of the distressing news about humanity being discovered by various physical and social scientists. Barbieri asserts in this issue that there are countervailing views and discoveries about our minds and our mores, enough for us to hope for the frequent, if…

Study objective: To describe a successful approach to teaching principles and practices of behaviour change through a behaviour change plan (BCP) initiative to improve personal health while advancing health knowledge and general education intellectual skills. Students' perspectives of obstacles, behaviours important towards goal attainment and the…

Worry has been shown to predict a variety of health behaviors, such as cancer screening, yet there are few studies linking worry and nutrition. This study used nationally representative data from National Cancer Institute's Food Attitudes and Behavior Survey ("n" = 3,397) to examine the association between health-related worry and a variety of…