Hello and welcome to Health Behavior Change from Evidence to Action. I'm Professor Marney White, and I'll be your instructor for the class. Right now, I'd like to give you a little bit of an overview of what this class will seek to do, and also tell you a little bit about the assignments and what would be expected of you, the students. This course will consist of several video lectures, and after each lecture or after most of the lectures, you will be asked to complete online quizzes and various assignments. We will also expect for you to post to the discussion board at times. The overall bulk or the goal of this class, however is that, you'll be learning by doing. In addition to listening to the lectures and doing the readings, it is my belief that most of the learning in health behavior change will occur through trying to apply the knowledge and principles to your own life. So to that end, I will be asking students to choose and select small modifiable goals and use the strategies that I will instruct you on how to do to apply them to make small modifiable behaviors in a variety of domains. You will also hopefully learn skills and theories that'll be relevant beyond the scope of this class. Ideally, it is my hope that you will continue with some of these health improvement projects, not only for the duration of the course, but after it is concluded. So I'll start with something that I think is important for you to know about how this course was developed is that, I am a clinical psychologist specializing in health promotion behaviors, I'm also a professor in the School of Public Health at Yale, and much of my work is based on prevention work. Because something that we understand in public health is that it is much more effective to prevent the onset of a disease than it is to try to cure it once it has occurred or once it has progressed. So a lot of my work these days is based on prevention work in terms of both mental health, but also other kinds of chronic diseases. So something else that I'd like to disclose to all students enrolled in my courses is that, when I'm asking you, the students to engage in health improvement projects, I'm doing them too. I know something that we all know in the medical field and public health, it is extremely difficult to change health behaviors. So to that end, I also participated everything that I'm recommending that you do as well. The overall learning objectives for this course is that I would like you to be able to identify both individual and environmental factors that contribute to overall well-being, and specifically with respect to health behaviors. So this class will help what will draw from best practices of clinical psychology, health psychology, and behavioral psychology, as well as things that we know from the larger field of public health, to help people make informed health decisions and to utilize the best practices and apply them to your own well-being. So to that end, this course is based on applying principles and best practices from what we've learned from behavioral psychology. I'll also like you to develop skills and knowledge for people. It will be useful for both health practitioners as well as the general public, and so this class will aim to helping you apply theory, methods, and utilize the most recent knowledge base with respect to clinical and health research to help you make informed decisions. Various thoughts will be also very critically examining the medical and public health research literature, and we'll also be spending some time talking about media portrayals of health information or of health science because this is what most people have access to. Finally, it is the aim that you will be able to evaluate and synthesize research literature to apply this to your own health decisions. In terms of the content, initially, we will talk about the best science in behavior change. I'll be teaching you the fundamentals of behavioral theory and teaching you how to apply these to change behaviors, any behaviors, but specifically in this class we'll be focusing on health behaviors. We will then get into three different domains. We've chosen these domains because they are the most central to general well-being, but we'll be focusing on nutrition, physical activity, and mental health. So you as the students will be asked to select small modifiable goals in each of these domains and aim to change them in yourself. As we get closer, I will give specific instruction on how to choose an attainable goal and also how to choose an appropriate behavior change strategy to increase the likelihood that you will achieve that goal. Throughout all of the topics, we will be talking about the influence of health behaviors in chronic disease prevention. In terms of my approach, the ideal is that I'd like to be as conversational as possible. So to that end, for every one of the video lectures, I will have guests students here at Yale joining me in the studio. I think it's very important to have the perspective of others, and also I think it's important for students to hear about the various struggles as well as successes that we all experience with respect to our own health behaviors. As I explained, most of the assignments are based on doing, actually going through the process of attempting to change behavior, and the ultimate goal then would be that, not only will you have learned a great deal, but that your health might benefit. Finally, I hope that you'll become a critical consumer of both the research literature and the media presentations of health advice, and that you can then be an effective conveyor of that information to those in your environment or to the people with whom you work. So thank you very much for joining this course, and I hope that you derive much benefit from it. Thank you.
