Healthy eating has important well-being and financial implications for our society. As such, it is critical that the field of behavior science and behavior analysis conduct more research in this area so that effective interventions may be developed. One barrier to addressing healthy eating may be conceptual. Far from being a single response, eating is comprised of a series of choice responses. These selection, preparation and consumption responses form a temporally delayed behavioral chain. When designing interventions to address healthy eating, therefore, one must not only consider the specific target response, but alternative response options, and the effect of changing one response on other choices in the chain. The purpose of this article is to refine the analysis of healthy eating behavior, provide examples of research conducted in this area, and discuss how these interventions may influence this chain of responses. It is hoped that by doing so, additional research will be conducted and disseminated so that individuals, organizations, and policy makers can implement more effective interventions for healthy eating.
Motivative augmentals are rules or statements that temporarily change the effectiveness of a consequence, similar to establishing operations for nonverbal consequences (Hayes, Barnes-Holmes, & Roche, 2001). Many communications by an organization's leadership may function as such and alter the function of stimuli in the workplace, which in turn may influence employee behaviors (Houmanfar & Rodrigues, 2012). There is a lack of experimental research regarding this, however, particularly under different organizational pay systems (i.e., financial
The present study evaluated the extent to which a low-cost, antitheft intervention impacted theft and sales in a multiple baseline design across two grocery stores. Previous research has measured the impact on theft of items that have a sign indicating their high theft rate and stickers next to or on the items. In contrast, this study tracked four intervention groups: a group directly marked with a sign and ribbons, two indirectly targeted groups (sign-only and a group down the aisle from the sign-only), and a group with no intervention. Results indicated the largest decrease in theft for one of the indirectly targeted groups, from 45 total items stolen to 13, compared to a smaller decrease in theft (i.e., 64 to 40) for the directly targeted sign and ribbons products. Implications of these findings for applying behavior-based antitheft interventions in retail businesses are discussed and future research is proposed.
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