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Legislation, economic incentives and informational campaigns are traditional tools of government used to exert its influence on citizens. More recently, other behavioral interventions called nudges and boosts have also come into usage to influence behavior. Nudges exploit faults in human decision making, pushing the individual in a direction of a specific choice, hence the name nudge. Boosts instead try to foster existing competences in the individual, effectivizing decision making while still preserving the individual’s own agency. Both nudges and boosts have proved to be cost-effective ways of influencing behavior, making them attractive alternatives to traditional behavioral interventions. An a priori way to investigate the effectiveness of behavioral interventions without their implementation is by measuring their acceptance. This thesis investigates the acceptance for nudges and boosts compared to traditional behavioral interventions when used in the domain of energy saving practices. The results show that acceptance differs greatly depending on which behavioral intervention is used, which energy saving domain the behavioral intervention is applied to, and to an extent the demographic characteristics of the individuals exposed to the behavioral intervention.

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Topic: Structuring of inpatient behavioral programming in child-adolescent psychiatric, residential treatment, and juvenile justice settings. Purpose: To review the underlying theory underpinning current practices and recommend remedies to the uncovered problems. Sources: A review of the literature from 1965 to 2001 from selected nursing and medical psychiatric and mental health publications. Conclusions: Intensive professional and staff education and greater precision in communication about patients' behaviors are needed in many settings. There is also a need to move away from generic treatment approaches and return to individual treatment planning based on individual assessments and the unique needs of an increasingly volatile and complex in-patient population.

Across the U.S., obesity and overweight represent a rapidly growing public health concern that have been associated with expensive and debilitating outcomes such as depression, cancers, diabetes, and other metabolic disorders, cardiovascular disease, and significant disruption in quality of life, in addition to the tremendous public health costs. The current study examined a brief, randomized-controlled trial of acceptance and commitment therapy (ACT) with overweight and obese young adults. The results of this study hold important implications for future research in the utility of ACT to address overweight- and obesity-related lifestyle change. While the study was limited due to small sample size, it nevertheless suggested that weight-related psychological flexibility is an important construct to address and target in the treatment of overweight and obesity. It may be an effective means of decreasing emotional eating and improving a sense of control while eating. The findings support previous research supporting ACT as an empirically supported intervention for improving the quality of life of adults struggling with overweight and obesity. Results from this study are encouraging and support the utility of ACT, even in brief format, to possibly improve the lives of overweight and obese young adults. Study participants were randomly assigned to a 4-week experimental ACT group or an information control group, which received psychoeducational materials regarding lifestyle behaviors recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The results of the current study broadly showed that the experimental intervention was effective at improving weight-related psychological flexibility, which was also associated with reductions in emotionally avoidant eating and uncontrolled eating. In addition, the study showed relationships between improvements in psychological flexibility and eating process variables.

Effective and efficient skill-acquisition procedures must be identified to support individualized behavioral programming for children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD). To do this, practitioners and researchers may use assessment-based instruction. Prompts are a common teaching strategy to promote skill acquisition. The purpose of this applied study was to use assessment-based instruction to evaluate the efficacy and efficiency of within- and extra-stimulus prompts to teach conditional discriminations to two children with ASD. We identified stimulus prompts using a survey of popular children's games and conducted a tablet-based instruction readiness assessment. Stimulus prompts involved motion (within-stimulus) and pointing (extra-stimulus) to evoke correct responses in the presence of a discriminative stimulus. We used an adapted alternating treatments design with a no-treatment control condition to evaluate the effects of both prompt types across multiple sets of stimuli. Both stimulus prompt types were efficacious in facilitating skill acquisition for two of three participants. Little difference was observed in the time to mastery with either prompt. Neither stimulus prompt was efficacious for the third participant. Assessment results will be used to inform clinical programming to teach conditional discriminations to participants and contribute to research on designing and implementing assessments of skill-acquisition procedures.

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