Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： Maintaining optimal hand hygiene is an important strategy for infection control and prevention. However, how to increase adherence to hand hygiene practices has been a major challenge to prevent infectious diseases and reduce hospital acquired infections (HAIs), especially in the critical period of COVID-19 epidemic regular prevention and control. There are great differences in the effectiveness between different hand hygiene behavior intervention strategies, and the best hand hygiene intervention practice is still in development and requires further investigation. In order to develop intervention strategies for health care researchers and practitioners, the current research systematically summarizes hand hygiene behavior intervention strategies from the perspective of “nudge” for the first time. Traditional hand hygiene interventions are usually based on knowledge sharing and health education, which only produce weak or modest effects on hand hygiene practices. Recent research in behavioral science provides insights for developing effective behavioral interventions to optimize hand hygiene practices by helping people form better hand hygiene habits. Traditional intervention strategies tend to rely on people’s ability to engage in rational thinking and the availability of cognitive resources, that is, encouraging people to reflect on their hand hygiene behaviors and enhance their handwashing motivation in a rational and conscious way. The influences of external environmental factors are rarely taken into account in traditional intervention strategies. Similarly, the role of personal psychological factors is often ignored, so this kind of hand hygiene intervention strategy often shows limited effectiveness and low sustainability. In addition, there are many other common obstacles such as limited accessibility of hand hygiene products, people's overconfidence in their immune system to prevent infection, inertia, and habitual forgetting. Many research results show that even if traditional intervention strategies can increase risk awareness of poor hand hygiene and enhance hand washing intention in the target population, they may not lead to effective behavior changes in hand hygiene. Inspired by the research from behavioral sciences, researchers have tried to promote experiential, unconscious, and automatically triggered hand hygiene behavior through interventions of specific psychological or external environmental factors, so as to help people overcome the gap between hand washing intention and behaviors. Based on different influential mechanisms, hand hygiene nudging strategies can be classified into four categories and nine subordinate categories, including providing decision information (simplifying information, providing feedback, and harvesting the impact of social norms), optimizing decision options (simplifying options and making original options more attractive), influencing decision structure (increasing the accessibility and visibility of favorable options), and reminding decision direction (direct reminder and environmental hint). Previous studies have shown that behavioral science-based hand hygiene interventions, in general, achieved positive effects at a fairly low cost, which are worthy of further application. However, there are still many disputes concerning ethics and effectiveness for nudging intervention. Among these disputes, the two points often mentioned are whether nudging limits the decision-makers' freedom of independent choice and damages their ability of independent choice. These two disputes may have a relatively small impact on hand hygiene promotion, and the form of nudging intervention is more easily accepted by the public, which may be due to the fact that handwashing behavior essentially has a certain degree of “injunctive norm” tendency (i.e., the vast majority of people agree with maintaining hand hygiene). In addition, previous research on hand hygiene nudging intervention also has many limitations, including low accuracy of the evaluation criteria, sustainability, and generalizability of nudging strategies. Further research is warranted to develop more effective hand hygiene nudging interventions and apply them to diverse social contexts. The effectiveness of multi-facet nudging strategies has also been confirmed in hand hygiene practices, suggesting that another future research direction is to construct a hand hygiene nudging strategy classification system similar to the Behavior Change Technique (BCT) taxonomy, so as to design multi-facet nudging strategies for promoting hand hygiene in a specific social context. Based on China's national conditions, traditional hand hygiene intervention strategies such as health education cannot be completely abandoned. This kind of comprehensive new model of “traditional intervention + nudging strategies” and the personalization and specialization of nudging intervention strategies might be the focus of hand hygiene behavior promotion intervention in the future. However, there is still a lack of hand hygiene nudging intervention in Chinese sociocultural contexts. Another direction for future research is to carry out such nudging interventions in hospitals, schools, communities, and other public places based on the theory of behavioral change, so as to contribute to the prevention and control of infectious diseases and improve public health.
Subjects: Psychology >> Social Psychology submitted time 2023-03-28 Cooperative journals: 《心理科学进展》
Abstract： Smoking is one of the major public health challenges around the world. Traditional tobacco control strategies, which include health education, taxes on tobacco products, and restrictions on smoking in public spaces, have greatly contributed to the reduction of smoking behavior around the world. However, these strategies are not always effective in helping smokers successfully quit smoking. As the traditional strategies do not consider the “irrational characteristics” of smoking behavior and its underlying mechanisms, their effects are usually discounted in real-world contexts. Recent advances in applied behavioral sciences during the past several decades provide new approaches for nudging smokers to quit smoking, which could be used to develop more effective tobacco control strategies at both the individual and population level. This article systematically reviews recent empirical research on behavioral intervention strategies to nudge smoking cessation according to the framework developed by Duckworth and colleagues for improving self-control. Specifically, behavioral nudge interventions for promoting smoking cessation could be classified by the people or organization implementing the intervention (e.g., smokers versus governments and public health agencies) and their underlying mechanisms (e.g., cognitively oriented versus context oriented). Context oriented interventions implemented by governments and public health agencies include reducing the accessibility of tobacco retail outlets in residence areas, restricting the display of tobacco products in stores and supermarkets, so as to reduce exposure of tobacco products, offering smaller size of cigarette products, and establishing separate smoking areas and removing tobacco-related irritants from the environment; cognitively oriented interventions implemented by governments and public health agencies include printing prominent warning pictures on cigarette packets, removing marketing information from cigarette packs, and increasing the usage of smoking cessation services; context oriented interventions implemented by smokers include making a public commitment to stop smoking and inviting important others to monitor one's smoking behavior, using loss aversion to motivate quitting behavior among smokers; cognitively oriented interventions implemented by smokers include making specific, actionable smoking cessation programs, promoting a future-oriented time perspective, and cultivating incremental theories of smoking behavior. This framework makes it easier for governments and smokers to select appropriate behavioral nudge interventions. It also has implications for informing the development of culturally sensitive and adaptive behavioral intervention strategies for promoting smoking cessation in China, improving the efficiency and effectiveness of smoking cessation interventions, and contributing to the achievement of the “Tobacco Control Initiatives” of the “Healthy China2030 Initiatives”. Although there is progress in developing effective behavioral nudge interventions for smoking cessation, future research is warranted to comprehensively evaluate the effects of these interventions, including both positive and negative effects, short-term and long-term effects, especially in real-world contexts. Future research is also needed to adopt behavioral change strategies in the development of stop-smoking APPs and digital smoking cessation services. By fully understanding the irrational characteristics of smoking behavior and its underlying mechanisms, we can develop tailored, targeted, context adaptable, and applicable smoking cessation intervention strategies. These types of interventions can greatly increase the effectiveness and efficiency of smoking cessation services. Future research is also needed to preclude the negative impacts of e-cigarettes and prevent the misuse of these behavior nudge strategies, especially among young children and adolescents who are vulnerable to the attraction of e-cigarettes. We believe that behavior science-informed interventions, if successfully implemented with the collaboration of governments, public health agencies, and smokers, can greatly contribute to safeguarding the health of both smokers and the general public.
Subjects: Psychology >> Medical Psychology submitted time 2021-11-24
Abstract： Maintaining optimal hand hygiene is an important strategy for infection control and prevention, but how to increase adherence to hand hygiene practices has been a major challenge to prevent infectious diseases and reduce hospital acquired infections (HAIs). Hand hygiene nudging intervention based on behavioral science transforms hand washing behavior into an automatic triggering habit in a more “imperceptible” way, which makes up for many limitations of traditional hand hygiene intervention based on knowledge sharing and health education. Given on different influential mechanisms, hand hygiene nudging strategies can be classified into four categories: providing decision information, optimizing decision options, influencing decision structure and reminding decision direction. The effectiveness of multi-facet nudging strategies has also been confirmed in practice, but there is still a lack of hand hygiene nudging intervention in Chinese sociocultural contexts. The future direction is to carry out such nudging interventions in hospitals, schools, communities and other public places in China based on the theory of behavioral sciences, so as to contribute to the prevention and control of infectious diseases and improve public health. "
Peer Review Status:
Awaiting Review
Subjects: Psychology >> Developmental Psychology submitted time 2019-06-21
Abstract： " That sleep quality could affect individual’s risk-taking behavior has been largely confirmed and supported by a growing body of research. It has been revealed that sleep loss affects not only the functional integrity of the frontal cortex, but also the activation of the amygdala and striatum brain regions, ultimately increasing individuals’ risk-taking behavior by decreasing their perception of danger and sensitivity to loss. However, previous studies have mostly focused on adult populations and neglected the interaction effect of personality traits and social environment on the relationship between sleep quality and risk-taking behavior. Moreover, due to the prevalence of sleep deprivation and high-risk-taking behavior in adolescents, the implications of further studies to understand these dynamics—especially the neural processing involved—in this population are addressed.
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