Affect, Dual-processing, Developmental Psychopathology, and Health Behaviors

Abstract

This chapter discusses dual-process models of (health) behaviors, regarding both their recent criticisms and implications for health interventions. It agrees with critics that impulsive and reflective processes should not be equated with specific brain processes, but that psychological processes are emergent properties of the dynamic unfolding interplay between different neural systems. It maintains that at a psychological level of description, these models can still be useful to understand challenges to health behaviors and possible interventions. Affective processes can influence impulsive decision-making in health, but also reflective processes, when they concern affectively relevant goals. Cognitive training methods, including cognitive bias modification and training of executive control, have shown some success in changing health behaviors, but a critical variable for long-term success appears to be motivation to change.