News | Science Of Behavior Change

Grand Rounds

Recording | Kenneth Freedland, PhD Presents: Pilot Trials of Health-Related Behavioral Interventions: Problems, Solutions, and Recommendations

Presentation recording here.

Dr. Kenneth Freedland is a Professor of Psychiatry and Psychology at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis, the Editor-in-Chief of Health Psychology, and the Program Director of the annual NIH/OBSSR Summer Institute on Randomized Behavioral Clinical Trials. His methodological interests include feasibility and pilot studies and the selection and design of comparators for randomized controlled trials of health-related behavioral interventions. He chaired the NIH/OBSSR Expert Panel on Comparator Group Selection in Behavioral and Social Science Clinical Trials and has published several papers and chapters on comparators and on pilot studies.

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Events

October 28, 2020 | APS Connects – Journal Club paper | Does episodic future thinking repair immediacy bias at home and in the laboratory in patients with prediabetes?

Please join the next APS Connects meeting on Wednesday, October 28 at 2:00 pm Eastern. APS Connects – Journal Club paper: “Does episodic future thinking repair immediacy bias at home and in the laboratory in patients with prediabetes?” Published in the Sept 2020 issue of Psychosomatic Medicine. APS members can read the article in the latest issue of the Journal, either in your paper copy or on the Journal website.

Join APS Connects at the following link:

https://us02web.zoom.us/j/84916214581?pwd=dEpZTjhTdVp5bGIvL0NFM2Jxa1h2QT09

Meeting ID: 849 1621 4581

Password: 784615

To dial in use: 312-626-6799 or 646-876-9923

Events

October 2, 2020 | SBM Webinar on Climate Change, Behavior Change, and Health: Tackling Global Challenges Together

Rapid accelerations in the effects of climate change paired with new and ongoing pandemics affecting global health – including obesity and COVID-19 – create the imperative to find solutions that address multiple challenges at once. This session is part of an emerging effort to advance research to help individuals and communities engage in behaviors that synergistically benefit both human health and the global environment. Internationally recognized leaders from a diverse set of climate and health research organizations will share evidence-based principles, best practices, and lessons learned for successful transdisciplinary research. Each speaker will provide brief remarks and participate in a moderated discussion focused on strategies for identifying and building successful collaborations and partnerships, developing novel research questions, and facilitating knowledge integration across diverse perspectives. Drawing on their in-depth knowledge and broad experience, the speakers will share practical guidance to help enhance the capacity for transdisciplinary science and offer key insights for those preparing to tackle global climate and health challenges together.

Register here.

Special Issue: The Science of Behavior Change: Implementing the Experimental Medicine Approach

A pioneering collaboration between 10 prestigious institutions across the nation has released a special issue of Health Psychology that proposes groundbreaking approaches to uncover basic behavioral processes that influence behavior change. This collaboration involves researchers at the Feinstein Institutes for Medical Research of Northwell Health, Columbia University, Medical University of South Carolina, Oregon Health & Science University, SUNY Downstate Health University, Yale University, University of California Berkeley, University of Connecticut, Harvard University, and Boston University.

In this special issue, the authors unveil nearly a dozen scientific tests of basic behavioral processes and two commentaries covering diverse scientific areas in behavior change interventions. They describe how investigative teams are using the experimental method to advance our understanding of what drives human behavior, such as medication adherence, mindfulness training, and episodic future thinking. Importantly, each scientific team describes how they have adhered to Open Science processes in the conceptualization and implementation of their project. With this new knowledge, researchers can move beyond a trial-and-error approach to develop powerful evidence-based tools that improve behavior change interventions across a wide range of human behavior.

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Open Scholarship Knowledge Base

Introducing the Open Scholarship Knowledge Base (OSKB), a free repository of open practice education and training resources.

Events

July 31, 2020 | Society of Behavioral Medicine Presents The Fundamentals of Climate Change and Health Behavior Change

WEBINAR: The Fundamentals of Climate Change and Health Behavior Change

Friday, July 31st, 2020 (11:30 a.m. – 1:00 p.m. EDT)

In this webinar, three experts will present research on climate change and health behavior change. Speakers will describe climate change and both the adaptive and mitigative responses by humans in response to it. Health behaviors will be discussed in the context of climate change from an individual, policy, and systems perspective. The webinar will conclude with a Q&A.

Register for the webinar

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Jobs

Pilot Funding Opportunity | NIA-funded Reversibility Network

The NIA-funded Reversibility Network (PIs: Eric Loucks, Margaret Sheridan, Keith Godfrey) is designed to foster research to reverse/remediate the effects of early life adversity (e.g. abuse, neglect, poverty, racial discrimination, etc.) in mid- and later-life, and welcomes scientists to apply for pilot funding through the Reversibility Network program shown below. Applications are due on Aug. 14.

Events

Recording | Donald Edmondson, PhD Presents The Role of Mechanism Discovery and Targeting in the NIH Stage Model

Overview: The need for effective behavioral interventions has never been greater, but existing interventions yield weak and/or difficult to replicate effects. Further, implementation of behavioral interventions at scale is rare, and may further dilute intervention effects. The NIH Stage Model provides a framework for guiding intervention development from early phase discovery through large scale implementation, and the NIH Science of Behavior Change (SOBC) program has articulated a rigorous method for incorporating the underlying mechanisms of behavior change at each stage of intervention development. This talk will discuss how the two frameworks for research complement each other, and how individual researchers can adopt practices that will yield more powerful, replicable, and informative interventions.

Recording link here.

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Jobs

COVID-19 Response Resources

Various resources are publically available for those in the research community looking for funding opportunities and research materials related to COVID-19. In an effort to collect those resources for COVID-19 research, the following links are made available here and on the SOBC Resources page.

1. The NIH Office of Behavioral and Social Sciences Research’s (OBSSR) collection of funding opportunities specific to COVID-19 and the Behavioral and Social Sciences. Link here.

2. NIH Public Health Emergency and Disaster Research Response (DR2). NIH DR2 provides various data collection tools, resources, and training materials for public health emergencies and disasters, including the current COVID-19 pandemic. Link here.

3. PhenX Toolkit with COVID-19 related measurement protocols. Link here.

Events

Upcoming Mind the Gap Webinar | Connections Between Traditional and Causal Mediation Methods

Presented by: David P. MacKinnon, Ph.D.

Thursday, June 18, 2020 | 2:00–3:00 p.m. ET

Register here.

About the Webinar

This presentation describes mediation analysis and the connections between traditional mediation analysis and recently developed causal mediation analysis. Mediating variables have a long and important history in theoretical and applied research because they describe how and why two variables are related. One common example of applied mediation research is the study of the mediating processes that explain how a prevention/treatment program achieves its effects on an outcome variable. If the intervention’s active ingredients are identified, the intervention can be made more powerful and more efficient. Other applied mediation examples include identifying how a risk factor leads to disease and how early life experiences affect later development.

Important recent developments in causal mediation analysis include new counterfactual (potential outcomes) methods that generate accurate estimates for continuous and categorical measures. In general, researchers have been slow to adopt causal mediation methods because of their complexity and the perceived lack of connection between traditional and causal methods. However, understanding connections between traditional and causal mediation increases understanding of both methods. The background for each approach is described, along with questions about traditional mediation and potential outcomes that causal mediation perspectives can help answer. The presentation ends with future directions in mediation theory and statistical analysis.

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