OBJECTIVE Beliefs in one's ability to perform a task or behaviour successfully are described as self-efficacy beliefs (Bandura, 1977). Since individuals have to deal with differing demands during a behaviour-change process, they form phase-specific self-efficacy beliefs directed at these respective challenges. The present study, based on the Health Action Process Approach (Schwarzer, 2001), exa...

Agent-based applications have the potential to assist humans in their lifestyle change, for instance eliminating addictive behaviours or adopting new healthy behaviours. In order to provide adequate support, agents should take into consideration the main mechanisms underlying behaviour formation and change. Within this process habits play a crucial role: automatic behaviours that are developed ...

The evidence on the role of particular lifestyles, smoking, binge drinking, lack of physical activity, and poor health care seeking, in increased risks for mortality and morbidity is compelling [1]. Understanding the pathways through which these various " unhealthy " behaviours affect health is complicated by the broader ecological context in which they occur. The complexity is further enhanced...

This paper examines Internal Vowel Alternation (IVA) in Noun Plurals (e.g. 'tooth/teeth') and Past Tense formation (e.g. 'sing/sang') according to the signoriented theory of the Columbia School (CS) in general and the theory of Phonology as Human Behavior (PHB) in particular. Today, these IVA forms are considered to be "irregular", and are vestiges of former prevalent and productive processes i...

many researchers have investigated how to increase the overall efficiency of solar-driven thermal systems. several key parameters, such as collector efficiency and storage tank characteristics, may impose some constraints on the annual solar fraction (asf) of such systems. in this paper, the behaviour of integrating the phase change material (pcm) in sdhw systems is modelled and optimized numer...

BACKGROUND Self-management interventions are considered effective in patients with chronic disease, but trials have shown inconsistent results, and it is unknown which patients benefit most. Adequate self-management requires behaviour change in both patients and health care providers. Therefore, the Activate intervention was developed with a focus on behaviour change in both patients and nurses...

one of the bio-sensing mechanisms is mechanical. rather than measuring shift in resonance frequency, we adopt to measure the change in spring constant due to adsorption, as one of the fundamental sensing mechanism. this study explains  determination of spring constant of a surface functionalized micro machined micro cantilever, which resonates in a trapezoidal cavity-on silicon wafer, with the ...

Human behaviour is still mysterious. Why do we do what we do? Why do we sometimes not do what we want to do? Why is it so difficult to change habits? The purpose of this paper is to examine how general psychological theory of health behaviour change and maintenance contribute to the understanding of initiating and maintaining exercise behaviour. Some popular models to identify what psychologica...

This paper presents how the function–behavior–structure (FBS) ontology can be used to represent processes despite its original focus on representing objects. The FBS ontology provides a uniform framework for classifying processes, and includes higher level semantics in their representation. We show that this ontology supports a situated view of processes based on a model of three interacting wo...