Benjamin Gardner

Verified

Benjamin verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

Verified

Benjamin verified their affiliation via an institutional email.

Learn more

• BA, MRes, DPhil, TLHPE, AFBPSs
• Reader in Psychology at University of Surrey

Fly-in fly-out (FIFO) work involves commuting long distances and living in provided accommodation for 1–4 weeks while on shift. Little is known about couple communication and relationship satisfaction of this population. Separate cohorts of FIFO workers and partners of FIFO workers completed daily surveys to self-report time spent communicating wit...

Background Frailty is common in later life and can lead to adverse health outcomes. Services aimed at preventing decline in early stages of frailty may support older people to remain independent for longer. We developed and tested a new service, HomeHealth, in a randomised controlled trial. HomeHealth was a multidomain behaviour change service base...

Background. Regular physical activity (PA) improves both physical and mental health, yet most people are insufficiently active. Identifying modifiable determinants of PA will aid development of effective PA promotion interventions. It is well recognised that PA is at least partly regulated by automatic processes, which capture simple associations t...

Objectives: To explore barriers and facilitators to behaviour change in older people with mild frailty. Design: Qualitative study. Setting: Community-dwelling older people living with mild frailty. Participants: 64 older people with mild frailty, workers delivering the service and stakeholders. Methods: Semistructured interviews were condu...

When self‐regulatory resources are depleted, people tend to act more on “autopilot”, with minimal forethought. It follows that when sleepy, people should be more likely to act habitually, based on learned cue–behaviour associations that trigger behaviour automatically when the cue is encountered. This ecological momentary assessment study investiga...

University students are typically highly sedentary, which is associated with adverse physical and mental health outcomes. Attempts to understand university students’ sedentary behaviour have typically focused on on-campus teaching and learning activities. While such research has documented that students perceive studying as one of the main barriers...

Background Eveningness chronotype—the tendency for later sleep and wake times—arises from a confluence of psychosocial, behavioral, and biological factors. With the onset and progression of puberty, many young people develop an eveningness chronotype, which remains prevalent through the transition into adulthood. Eveningness has been associated wit...

Background Parkinson's disease is a complex progressive neurodegenerative disease increasing globally. Self‐management interventions have shown promise in improving the quality of life for people with chronic conditions. This paper aims to describe the development processes and the core components of a facilitated self‐management toolkit to support...

Working at home, rather than in the workplace, has been suggested to affect office-based workers’ health and wellbeing. This exploratory, cross-sectional study sought to identify discrete psychological responses to home-working practices and investigate their relationship with engagement in health-related behaviours and wellbeing. A sample of 491 h...

Background: Exercise rehabilitation programmes are important for long-term health and wellbeing among people with cardiac and pulmonary diseases. Despite this, many people struggle to maintain their physical activity once rehabilitation ends. This repeated measures study tracked changes in physical activity behaviour and motivation during and after...

Background It is challenging to predict long-term outcomes of interventions without understanding how they work. Health economic models of public health interventions often do not incorporate the many determinants of individual and population behaviours that influence long term effectiveness. The aim of this paper is to draw on psychology, sociolog...

Understanding the influence of habit on health behaviour, or the formation or disruption of health habits over time, requires reliable and valid measures of automaticity. The most used measure, the Self-Report Behavioural Automaticity Index (SRBAI; derived from the Self-Report Habit Index [SRHI]), comprises four items, which may be impractical in s...

Background: Exercise rehabilitation programs are important for long-term health and wellbeing among people with cardiac and pulmonary disease. De-spite this, many people struggle to maintain their physical activity once reha-bilitation ends. This repeated measures study tracked changes in physical ac-tivity behaviour and motivation during and after...

While physical activity (PA) has numerous health benefits, in rare cases it can become addictive and lead to adverse health effects. Automatic reactions to addiction-related cues are a hallmark of addiction, however, their association with exercise dependence (ED) remains unknown. This research examined the links between ED and automatic reactions...

Background University students typically face acute financial pressure, which can adversely impact mental health, wellbeing, and academic outcomes. This scoping review of qualitative and quantitative studies aimed to identify distinct money-management behaviours, and psychological determinants, to inform future interventions. Methods Two electroni...

Sustaining physical activity may require incorporating activity into everyday routines. Yet, many such routines are executed habitually, so people may not recognise physical activity opportunities. ‘Script Elicitation’—a novel intervention method whereby participants detail the content and structure of their routines and are supported to plan modif...

Uncovering the Role of Effort in the Rewarding Value of Sedentary Behavior

The influence of habit on physical activity is computationally modelled as the aggregated influence of past behavioral choices a person makes in a given context. Hypotheses include that the influence of habit on behavior can be enhanced through engagement of the target behavior in a particular context or weakened through engagement of alternative b...

Habit change is often seen as key to successful long-term behaviour change. Making 'good' behaviours habitual-that is, ensuring a behaviour is prompted automatically on exposure to situational cues, based on cue-response associations learnt through context-consistent repetition-is portrayed as a mechanism for sustaining such behaviours over time. C...

The growing tendency towards ‘urbanization’ is promoting an increase in resource consumption and waste generation, which requires proper waste separation management with active participation of the population. To this end, it is essential to know the personal modifiable factors that predict recycling. The primary aim of the present study is to deve...

Background and aims: Student mental health is of increasing concern: over a quarter of UK students report a mental health issue, and reactive support services cannot cope with increasing demand. Physical activity (PA) is associated with improved mental health in higher education settings. Universities are well placed to offer PA to promote students...

Introduction Frailty is a condition that makes it increasingly difficult for individuals to recover from adverse health events and gradually erodes independence. NHS interventions in England have focused on those with more severe frailty. We tested HomeHealth, a home-based, tailored, multi-domain (six-session) behaviour change intervention to promo...

Background The Live Well with Parkinson’s Self-Management Toolkit is designed for use in the NHS to support people with Parkinson’s, their carers and health professionals in managing motor and non-motor symptoms and promoting well-being. The Toolkit was developed based on theory-based behaviour change and self-management techniques in consultation...

Background: Mild cognitive impairment (MCI) affects 5-20% of older people in the UK, but often goes undiagnosed and is associated with increased risk of dementia. Targeting risk factors such as physical inactivity and social isolation through behaviour-change interventions could reduce this risk. However, it is unclear how MCI impacts engagement wi...

Evidence shows that people with strong physical activity habits tend to engage in more physical activity than those with weaker habits, but little is known about how habit influences specific types of physical activity. This study aimed to test whether mean level of habit strength and magnitude of the habit strength – behaviour association differed...

Issue addressed: Interventions targeting health care professionals' behaviours are assumed to support them in learning how to give behavioural advice to patients, but such assumptions are rarely examined. This study investigated whether key assumptions were held regarding the design and delivery of physical activity interventions among health care...

Background: The Live Well with Parkinson’s Self-Management Toolkit is designed for use in the NHS to support people with Parkinson’s, their carers and health professionals in managing motor and non-motor symptoms and promoting well-being. The Toolkit was developed based on theory-based behaviour change and self-management techniques in consultation...

Background: In the wake of Covid-19, the prevalence of working from home ('home-working') is expected to rise. Yet, working from home can have negative health and wellbeing impacts. Interventions are needed to promote effective ways of working that also protect workers' health and wellbeing. This study explored the feasibility and acceptability of...

Evidence shows that people with strong physical activity habits tend to engage in more physical activity than those with weaker habits, but little is known about how habit influences specific types of physical activity. This study aimed to test whether mean level of habit strength and magnitude of the habit strength – behaviour association differed...

Background Growing evidence suggests that sitting is activated automatically on exposure to associated environments, yet no study has yet sought to identify in what ways sitting may be automatic. Method This study used data from a 12-month sitting-reduction intervention trial to explore discrete dimensions of sitting automaticity, and how these di...

Background Attempts to improve evening sleep hygiene have overlooked that sleep preparation behaviours are often undertaken automatically with little awareness; that is, habitually. This mixed-methods study assessed aspects of the feasibility and acceptability of a novel behavioural intervention procedure (‘script elicitation’), which encourages re...

Lecture capture is popular within Higher Education, but previous research suggests that students do not always optimally select content to review, nor do they make the most of specific functions. In the current study conducted in the 2019/20 academic year, we used a repeated-measures crossover design to establish the effects of transcripts with clo...

Objectives: Interventions promoting habitual fruit consumption have the potential to bring about long-term behaviour change. Assessing the effectiveness of such interventions requires adequate habit and behaviour measures. Habits are based on learned context-behaviour associations , so measures that incorporate context should be more sensitive to e...

Objective: The Spring 2020 UK COVID-19 lockdown required normally-office-based workers to modify their work-related practices to work at home. This study explored workers' experiences of adapting to home-working, health behaviours and wellbeing. Methods: Twenty-seven home-working employees (19 female; aged 23-57y), from various industry sectors,...

To improve health and wellbeing, it is crucial that people regularly interrupt their sitting. In this paper, we propose a framework for examining and changing sitting behavior that addresses two key steps in the process towards developing effective interventions. First, we suggest that research should move away from its current focus on sitting tim...

Background The diet of toddlers is often not in accordance with dietary recommendations, putting them at risk of poor health outcomes later in life. Parents can struggle to provide their toddler with a healthy diet and interventions are needed. Helping parents to form healthy feeding habits may facilitate healthy feeding behaviours. Therefore, the...

A vegan diet, which excludes all animal-derived products, has been associated with some improvements in health, while also conferring environmental benefits. Understanding the psychological determinants of successfully switching to a vegan diet will help to inform the design of interventions supporting long-term dietary change. Studies to date have...

Background Adjuvant endocrine therapy (AET) reduces the risk of breast cancer recurrence and mortality. However, up to three-quarters of women with breast cancer do not take AET as prescribed. Existing interventions to support adherence to AET have largely been unsuccessful, and have not focused on the most salient barriers to adherence. This paper...

Background . Forming a habit - i.e., a cue-behaviour association learned through repeated performance - has been proposed to promote behaviour maintenance, but some commentators have questioned whether simple cue-behaviour associations can direct complex actions. This paper addresses this issue by drawing on a proposed distinction between 'habitual...

Objective: The COVID-19 pandemic saw promotion of novel virus transmission-reduction behaviours, and discouragement of familiar transmission-conducive behaviours. Understanding changes in the automatic nature of such behaviours is important, because habitual behaviours may be more easily reactivated in future outbreaks and disrupting old habits ma...

Background Frailty is clinically associated with multiple adverse outcomes, including reduced quality of life and functioning, falls, hospitalisations, moves to long-term care and mortality. Health services commonly focus on the frailest, with highest levels of need. However, evidence suggests that frailty is likely to be more reversible in people...

Recognized challenges in promoting long-term physical activity maintenance may be due to inconsistencies in the conceptualization and operationalization of behavior maintenance terminology in physical activity research. The overall goal of this paper is to propose a framework and agenda for the development of a common set of terms, definitions, and...

Physical distancing remains an important initiative to curb COVID‐19 and virus transmission more broadly. This exploratory study investigated how physical distancing behaviour changed during the COVID‐19 pandemic and whether it was associated with identity with virus transmission avoidance and physical distancing habit strength. In a longitudinal,...

Objective: Approximately 70% of adults with type 2 diabetes (T2D) fail to achieve the 150 minutes of weekly physical activity (PA) recommended for self-management. Interventions to promote PA adoption in T2D rarely achieve stable maintenance. Analysis of lived experiences of adults with T2D who have successfully transitioned to long-term PA mainte...

BACKGROUND Adjuvant endocrine therapy (AET) reduces breast cancer recurrence and mortality in women with early-stage breast cancer. Unintentional nonadherence to AET is common (e.g., forgetting to take medication). Forming habits surrounding medication-taking could reduce reliance on memory and improve AET adherence. Short Message Service (SMS) tex...

Background: Adjuvant endocrine therapy (AET) reduces breast cancer recurrence and mortality in women with early-stage breast cancer. Unintentional nonadherence to AET is common (eg, forgetting to take medication). Forming habits surrounding medication taking could reduce reliance on memory and improve AET adherence. SMS text messaging intervention...

Advances in understanding how habit forms can help people change their behaviour in ways that make them happier and healthier. Making behaviour habitual, such that people automatically act in associated contexts due to learned context-response associations, offers a mechanism for maintaining new, desirable behaviours even when conscious motivation...

Abstract Rationale: Translating research evidence into clinical practice to improve care involves healthcare professionals adopting new behaviours and changing or stopping their existing behaviours. However, changing healthcare professional behaviour can be difficult, particularly when it involves changing repetitive, ingrained ways of providing ca...

Objective: Around 40% of US university students use cannabis, 25% of whom present with cannabis use disorder, which endangers health. We investigated the concurrent contribution of reflective processes, which generate action via conscious deliberation, and non-reflective processes, which prompt behavior automatically, to undergraduates' cannabis c...

COVID-19 forced the closure of UK universities. One effect of this was a change in how lectures, and their recordings, were made and used. In this research, we aimed to address two related research questions. Firstly, we aimed to understand how UK universities replaced in-person lectures and, secondly, to establish what academic staff believed the...

Background Adjuvant endocrine therapy (AET) reduces the risk of breast cancer recurrence and mortality. However, up to three-quarters of women with breast cancer do not take AET as prescribed. Existing interventions to support adherence to AET have largely been unsuccessful, and have not focused on the most salient barriers to adherence. This paper...

Background Our thoughts impact our mental health and there is a distinction between thought content (what we think) and thought process (how we think). Habitual thinking has been proposed as one such process. Habits, which are cue-dependent automatic responses, have primarily been studied as behavioural responses.Methods The current scoping review...

Objective Habitual behaviours are triggered automatically, with little conscious forethought. Theory suggests that making healthy behaviours habitual, and breaking the habits that underpin many ingrained unhealthy behaviours, promotes long-term behaviour change. This has prompted interest in incorporating habit formation and disruption strategies i...

Background We aimed to establish what core elements were required in a group therapy programme for men who disclose perpetrating intimate partner abuse in a substance use setting and develop, and test the feasibility of delivering an intervention in this setting. Methods We describe the theoretical development and feasibility testing of an integra...

Objective: Many adolescents report a lack of physical activity (PA) and excess screen time (ST). Psychological theories aiming to understand these behaviours typically focus on predictors of only one behaviour. Yet, behaviour enactment is often a choice between options. This study sought to examine predictors of PA and ST in a single model. Variab...

Background To help implement behavior change interventions (BCIs) it is important to be able to characterize their key components and determine their effectiveness. Purpose This study assessed and compared the components of BCIs in terms of intervention functions identified using the Behaviour Change Wheel Framework (BCW) and in terms of their spe...

Skin cancer is highly burdensome, but preventable with regular engagement in sun protective behaviors. Despite modest effectiveness of sun-protective behavior promotional efforts thus far, rates of engagement in sun-protective behaviors remain low. More is needed to understand motivation for using sunscreen, wearing sun-protective clothing, and see...

THIS PAPER HAS NOW BEEN PUBLISHED and is open-access (incl available on ResearchGate). See doi 10.1080/23311908.2022.2041277. *** This paper proposes criteria for design, measurement, analysis and interpretation when tracking real-world habit formation and potential moderators of the effect of repetition on formation.

Objective. Habits, defined as well-learned associations between cues and behaviours, are essential for health-related behaviours, including physical activity (PA). Despite the sensitivity of habits to context changes, little remains known about the influence of a context change on the interplay between PA habits and behaviours. We investigated the...

Maintaining weight loss requires long-term behaviour change. Theory and evidence around habitual behaviour - i.e., action triggered by impulses that are automatically activated upon exposure to cues, due to learned cue-action associations - can aid development of interventions to support weight loss maintenance. Specifically, weight loss is more li...

Rationale: People with stroke experience falls at more than twice the rate of the general older population resulting in high fall-related injuries. However, there are currently no effective interventions that prevent falls after stroke. Aims: To determine the effect and cost-benefit of an innovative, home-based, tailored intervention to reduce f...

Background Cognitive enhancers (CE) are prescription drugs taken, either without a prescription or at a dose exceeding that which is prescribed, to improve cognitive functions such as concentration, vigilance or memory. Previous research suggests that users believe the drugs to be safer than non-users and that they have sufficient knowledge to judg...

Background: We aimed to establish what core elements were required in a group therapy programme for men who disclose perpetrating intimate partner abuse in a substance use setting and develop, and test the feasibility of delivering an intervention in this setting. Methods: We describe the theoretical development and feasibility testing of an integr...

Background Increasingly, national policy initiatives and programmes have been developed to increase physical activity (PA). However, challenges in implementing and translating these policies into effective local-level programmes have persisted, and change in population PA levels has been small. This may be due to insufficient attention given to the...

Objective. Habits, defined as well-learned associations between cues and behaviours, are essential for health-related behaviours, including physical activity (PA). Despite the sensitivity of habits to context changes, little remains known about the influence of a context change on the interplay between PA habits and behaviours. Here, we investigate...

Objective: This study explored whether the frequency and habitual nature of engagement in three behaviours that may serve as preparation for alcohol consumption on a night out with friends - that is, contacting friends to arrange a night out, buying alcohol, drinking alone at home before going out - predicted consumption on such nights. Design:...

Background: Regular physical activity (PA) is associated with many health benefits during childhood, and tracks into desirable PA patterns and health profiles in adulthood. Interventions designed to support these behaviours among young children are critical. Family-based interventions focusing on parent-child activities together (i.e., co-activity...

Habitual behaviours are elicited when a familiar context activates cue-behaviour associations that have been learned through previous performance. A core hypothesis within habit theory is that, by virtue of its automaticity, habit weakens the impact of intention on action, such that in facilitating conditions, action will be guided more by habit th...

This chapter presents the benefits of exercise benefits. Stronger exercise habit is beneficial because it should increase the likelihood of frequent exercise, as is supported by the commonly observed association between self‐reported habit and exercise frequency. Having strongly formed exercise habits makes it less likely that people will seek out...

Sedentary behaviour research to date has been predominantly based on self-reported sitting time, yet little attention has been paid to how respondents interpret sitting questionnaire items. 25 office workers participated in qualitative, ‘think-aloud’ interviews, describing their thoughts while completing 43 items derived from 9 existing questionnai...

Background: Dysphagia or difficulty in swallowing affects quality of life for most patients with head and neck cancer. SIP SMART - [Swallowing Intervention Package: Self-Monitoring, Assessment, Rehabilitation Training] aims to improve post-treatment swallowing outcomes through a targeted and tailored pre-treatment intervention. This feasibility st...

Introduction Regular physical activity (PA) participation has many important physical and psychological health benefits, managing and preventing over 25 chronic conditions. Being more physically active as a child is associated with being more active as an adult, but less than 10% of Canadian children are achieving the recommended PA guidelines of 6...

Background: Contextual cues play an important role in facilitating behaviour change. They not only support memory but may also help to make the new behaviour automatic through the formation of new routines. However, previous research shows that when people start a new behaviour, they tend to select cues that lack effectiveness for prompting behavi...

Background: Dysphagia or difficulty in swallowing affects quality of life for most patients with head and neck cancer. SIP SMART – [Swallowing Intervention Package: Self-Monitoring, Assessment, Rehabilitation Training] aims to improve post-treatment swallowing outcomes through a targeted and tailored pre-treatment intervention. This feasibility stu...

Many universities use lecture capture to record live lectures and make them available online, although this practice is not without controversy. We used an online survey to investigate perceptions of lectures and their capture in staff (N = 95) and students (N = 522). We found that they valued lectures and perceived capture differently, despite sim...

Background: Dysphagia or difficulty in swallowing affects quality of life for most patients with head and neck cancer. SIP SMART – [Swallowing Intervention Package: Self-Monitoring, Assessment, Rehabilitation Training] aims to improve post-treatment swallowing outcomes through a targeted and tailored pre-treatment intervention. This feasibility stu...

Abstract Many universities now use lecture capture. We used focus groups to investigate perceptions of lectures and their capture in staff (N = 8) and students (N = 17). We found that staff and students held different views of lectures and this impacted on their perceptions of lecture capture. Our findings confirmed a range of previously identified...

Background: Dysphagia or difficulty in swallowing affects quality of life for most patients with head and neck cancer. SIP SMART – [Swallowing Intervention Package: Self-Monitoring, Assessment, Rehabilitation Training] aims to improve post-treatment swallowing outcomes through a targeted and tailored pre-treatment intervention. This feasibility stu...

Background: Dysphagia or difficulty in swallowing affects quality of life for most patients with head and neck cancer. SIP SMART – [Swallowing Intervention Package: Self-Monitoring, Assessment, Rehabilitation Training] aims to improve post-treatment swallowing outcomes through a targeted and tailored pre-treatment intervention. This feasibility stu...

Background: Growing evidence suggests that prolonged uninterrupted sitting can be detrimental to health. Much sedentary behaviour research is reliant on self-reports of sitting time, and sitting-reduction interventions often focus on reducing motivation to sit. These approaches assume that people are consciously aware of their sitting time. Drawin...

Lecture capture use has increased in recent years. Research shows that staff and students view capture differently, but their views on the practice of opting-in and out has not been investigated previously, even though this element of practice can be specified in institutional policy and governance. Focus groups revealed that staff were unclear on...

Background: Studies of the physical activity intention-behavior gap, and factors that may moderate the gap (e.g., habit, perceived behavioral control), can inform physical activity promotion efforts. Yet, these studies typically apply linear modeling procedures, and so conclusions rely on linearity and homoscedasticity assumptions, which may not h...

Background: Office workers typically sit for most of the workday, which has been linked to physical and mental ill health and premature death. This mixed-methods study sought to identify barriers and facilitators to reducing sitting and increasing standing among office workers who received an intervention prototype (the ‘ReSiT [Reducing Sitting Tim...