PhD defence L.L. (Lili) Kókai

Summary:

The current thesis set out to design, implement, and evalute a theory- and evidencebased mHealth intervention to decrease risk for a leading cause of mortality and disability worldwide: cardiovascular diseases (CVDs). Specifically, this thesis aimed to conduct an innovative intervention to reduce risk of CVDs through behavioral risk factors, such as insufficient physical activity, accompanying cardio metabolic risk factors, for example overweight, and psychosocial risk factors, such as stress. Growing evidence suggests that interventions based on high-quality behavioral theory (i.e. that incorporates up-to-date insights from the vast knowledge on behavior change that is already available and has been found successful in predicting behavior at least observationally in previous studies) may lead to larger effects in health contexts than non-theory-based interventions. Interventions that are based on such a health behavior theory and then systematically link theoretical constructs to evidence-based behavior change techniques are hypothesized to be most effective of all. Therefore, this thesis set out to design a theory- and evidence based intervention to reduce CVD risk. Individual-level health promotion interventions that are based on theory are typically based on a prominent social cognition theory which describes behavior as the result of deliberative psychological processes. While interventions based on such theories have generally been shown to be effective in changing behavioral intentions, they often stop short of changing actual behavior. The insights from dual process theories might help to reduce this ‘intention-behavior gap’, as they account for both automatic processes and deliberative processes.