Environmental Determinants Of Behavior Research Articles

Adolescent nutrition and health: characteristics, risk factors and opportunities of an overlooked life stage.

Adolescence is a pivotal, yet frequently overlooked, period of life, with this age group often no longer receiving the focus, care and protection devoted to other life stages. Nutritional vulnerability increases in adolescence due to heightened nutritional requirements, yet the quality of the diets consumed by this age group often deteriorates significantly. Poor-quality dietary patterns and insufficient nutrient intakes are frequently observed amongst adolescents both in Ireland and globally. This deterioration in diet quality is greatly influenced by individual, social and environmental determinants of behaviour and health. The influences of each of these factors change and increase as adolescents begin to interact independently with the surrounding world. Poor nutrition during adolescence can result in several immediate and long-term health consequences, including micronutrient deficiencies, increased risk of overweight/obesity and increased presentation of cardiometabolic risk factors, all of which have been observed as persistent issues amongst adolescents in Ireland and internationally. Adolescence is a critical period of intervention to protect youth both now and into their future lives. This age group can be particularly receptive to the influence of society and the surrounding environment, posing several avenues in which to influence adolescents towards more health-promoting behaviour. This review aims to summarise the key nutritional and dietary characteristics of adolescents, to provide an overview of the causes and consequences of poor nutrition in adolescence, and to highlight potential opportunities for intervention to protect the health of this age group, with a particular focus on evidence from an Irish context.

Neighborhood Contexts, Health, and Behavior: Understanding the Role of Scale and Residential Sorting

Recent reviews in sociology, public health, and urban planning suggest small-scale geographic variations in urban environments are associated with an individual's health, behavior, and well-being. However, estimation of these ‘neighborhood effects' are complicated. One complicating factor is residential sorting: Individual characteristics such as race, age, and socioeconomic status are associated with behavior and health and these same individual-level factors are often geographically clustered within neighborhoods. This residential sorting leads to a correlation between individual and environmental determinants of behavior and health and poses problems for statistical inference. A second complicating factor is uncertainty about the geographic dimensions of a person's neighborhood. We explore these two potential confounders through a simulation experiment that generates synthetic cityscapes and synthetic behaviors for geolocated individuals. The simulation is used to develop a model of how residential sorting, urban structure, and the geographic definition of an individual's neighborhood affect our understanding of the association between the urban environment and behavior. We find that residential sorting does not systematically affect the magnitude of neighborhood effect estimates, however, the misrepresentation of the geographic dimensions of an individual's neighborhood leads to systematic bias in estimates of neighborhood effects. Unlike previous research on the modifiable areal unit problem we find a systematic relationship between the definition of geographic units of analysis and the magnitude of regression coefficients.

Joseph Vincent Brady (1922–2011).

Joseph Vincent Brady was born in New York City on March 28, 1922. Joe died on July 29, 2011. Joe was a pioneer in bringing the methods and philosophy of behavior analysis to the emerging field of behavioral pharmacology. In 1960, with David Rioch, Joe founded the nonprofit Institute for Behavioral Research (later the Institutes for Behavioral Resources, or IBR), which continues to the present day. True to his belief in the importance of the environmental determinants of behavior, when interviewed about his accomplishments in so many varied fields, Joe replied that in each area he had been "the beneficiary of a fortuitous environment."

A Community-Based Physical Education and Activity Intervention for African American Preadolescent Girls: A Strategy to Reduce Racial Disparities in Health

Physical activity habits fostered and developed early in life tend to persist into adulthood, reducing the incidence of chronic diseases associated with a sedentary lifestyle in later life. This is of particular importance for racial and ethnic minority populations who experience significant disparities in rates of chronic disease. Thus, promoting physical activity in minority children is an effective strategy for reducing these health disparities. Unfortunately, however, recommendations for effective implementation of such programs are sorely lacking. This article describes the development and implementation of Lively Ladies, a physical education and activity intervention targeted to low-income, preadolescent, African American girls in a community-based youth services organization. Low-income, minority girls face the catch-22 situation of being at higher risk for physical inactivity while having limited or no access to physical fitness programs. This article demonstrates that community-based youth organizations can play an important role in changing this situation. The authors’ experience with Lively Ladies indicates the effectiveness of a theory-based program addressing modifiable psychosocial and environmental determinants of behavior. They provide recommendations to guide future design and implementation of community-based physical education and activity interventions for a population group that tends to have increased risk for physical inactivity and limited access to fitness programs and facilities.

A Community-Based Physical Education and Activity Intervention for African American Preadolescent Girls: A Strategy to Reduce Racial Disparities in Health

Physical activity habits fostered and developed early in life tend to persist into adulthood, reducing the incidence of chronic diseases associated with a sedentary lifestyle in later life. This is of particular importance for racial and ethnic minority populations who experience significant disparities in rates of chronic disease. Thus, promoting physical activity in minority children is an effective strategy for reducing these health disparities. Unfortunately, however, recommendations for effective implementation of such programs are sorely lacking. This article describes the development and implementation of Lively Ladies, a physical education and activity intervention targeted to low-income, preadolescent, African American girls in a community-based youth services organization. Low-income, minority girls face the catch-22 situation of being at higher risk for physical inactivity while having limited or no access to physical fitness programs. This article demonstrates that community-based youth organizations can play an important role in changing this situation. The authors’ experience with Lively Ladies indicates the effectiveness of a theory-based program addressing modifiable psychosocial and environmental determinants of behavior. They provide recommendations to guide future design and implementation of community-based physical education and activity interventions for a population group that tends to have increased risk for physical inactivity and limited access to fitness programs and facilities.

Evolutionary theory and criminal behaviour

Purpose. To provide an introduction to evolutionary psychology by describing some of its applications in the literature on the psychology of criminal and antisocial behaviour.Argument. Selectionist thinking is applied to five areas: the relationship of age and sex to crime, the inverse correlation between degree of kinship and homicide, paedophilia, persistent antisociality, and sexual coercion. In each of these areas, ultimate causes of behaviour are distinguished from proximal causes. Ultimate causes are produced by selective forces in ancestral environments and are responsible for species typical characteristics. Proximal causes, in contrast, are contemporaneous developmental, genetic, and environmental determinants of behaviour.Conclusions. The interplay between ultimate and proximal causation provides new ways of understanding old problems and is a fruitful source of research hypotheses. Evolutionary psychology can provide a powerful integrative perspective on criminal and antisocial behaviour.

The Role of Thinking and Feeling: Extending Assessment beyond Behaviour

There has long been a potential tension between advocates of ‘behavioural approaches’ and advocates of ‘counselling approaches’, particularly in relation to work with pupils with special needs. The appeal of the cognitive behavioural approach described in this paper is that it integrates both the cognitive (counselling) and behavioural strategies. Thus the effectiveness of each approach can be used to enhance the effectiveness of the other. The writer argues that this leads to a more effective intervention than either approach used on its own. It also moves away from an almost total emphasis on the environmental determinants of behaviour towards a model which gives due weight to the feelings and thoughts of the pupils.

Psychology and the social construction of sex differences in theories of aggression

A growing body of feminist work is concerned with examining how the development of social science theories has been influenced by assumptions about natural sex differences. This paper examines the impact of such assumptions on the construction of theories in the psychology of aggression. It is based on a survey and critical review of psychology books and major research articles on aggression published between 1890 and the present. The paper emphasises the diverse manifestations of assumptions about natural sex differences, which are apparent even in theories which emphasise environmental determinants of behaviour. It is concluded that there is a need to systematically scrutinise psychological theories for their assumptions about natural sex differences, and that social constructionism can be an important ally in feminist efforts to challenge the ‘naturalness’ of sex differences.

School‐Based Programs for Preventing Eating Disturbances

This paper describes a framework for involving schools in primary and secondary prevention of eating disturbances. The issues of why, what, who, and how are considered. Research on the prevalence and consequences of obesity, anorexia and bulimia nervosa, unhealthy dieting, and behaviors such as binge eating and purging indicates why prevention is necessary. Research on the etiology of eating disturbances also provided a basis for determining what factors need to be addressed. However, research has not adequately addressed the question of who should be targeted for prevention and how the topic of prevention should be approached. While different approaches to school-based prevention programs are possible, a comprehensive school-based program is recommended. Important components of a comprehensive program include staff training, classroom interventions, integration of relevant material into existing curriculum, individual counseling and small group work with high risk students, referral systems, opportunities for healthy eating, modifications within the physical education program, and outreach activities. This type of comprehensive program is based on an ecological model for health promotion and aims at the modification of both individual and environmental determinants of behavior.

The contributions of B. F. Skinner to the interdisciplinary science of behavioural pharmacology

This paper reviews the impact on behavioural pharmacology of experimental methods and modes of interpretation derived from the work of B. F. Skinner. The techniques of operant conditioning have been widely used to enrich the database of behavioural pharmacology. Their use has repeatedly demonstrated that the effects of a drug on behaviour are schedule‐dependent, i.e. they depend on the characteristics of the behaviour against which the drug is assessed and thus on the environmental determinants of behaviour, as well as on the pharmacological characteristics of the drug and its effects on physiological systems. This major empirical contribution is illustrated by reference to studies of the effects of past behavioural and pharmacological experience, the reinforcing effects of drugs, and the stimulus properties of drugs. Such empirical findings call into question any assumption that the behavioural effects of drugs can be reduced to exclusively pharmacological explanations. They therefore also make a fundamental contribution to the theoretical base of a truly interdisciplinary science of behavioural pharmacology, and make contact with Skinner's non‐reductionistic theoretical analyses of behaviour.

Environmental determinants of behaviour in the rat fetus. II. The emergence of synchronous movement

Rat fetuses were observed directly in different micro-environments (in utero and ex utero) on successive days during the last third of gestation. Synchronous movements comprising two or more regions of the body became common on day 17 of gestation and were especially prevalent ex utero. Their occurrence could not be explained satisfactorily by a stochastic model involving chance association of individual body regions. If synchronized movements are considered as evidence of behavioural organization, then fetal behaviour appears more diverse than previously recognized and exhibits specific linkages between body regions that imply emergent coordination and the prenatal development of species-typical action patterns.

The persistence of dichotomies in the study of behavioral development

The inadequacies of dichotomous views of behavioral development that oppose learned and innate behavior, or genetic and environmental determinants of behavior, have long been recognized. However, they continue to exert a powerful influence on current thinking about development, often by way of metaphors that simply recast these old ideas in a more modern technical vocabulary. The idea that the information for behavior can be attributed to either genetic or environmental sources was originated by Lorenz and provides the basis for many current dichotomous accounts of behavioral development. Lorenz's “sources of information” metaphor for development is fundamentally flawed, however, as are those more recent accounts that are based on it. The alternative interactionist account of development, most clearly articulated by Lehrman, is a far more powerful and coherent theoretical framework for development, but it has not been broadly assimilated into psychology and continues to be widely misunderstood. In particular, the interactionist account does not involve a radical environmentalism, does not attribute all behavior to the effects of learning, and does not interpret development as a gene-environment interaction. The attractive simplicity of dichotomous thinking encourages its continued application to the study of development despite the fact that it is clearly inadequate to the complexities of developmental analysis.

Environmental determinants of behaviour in the rat fetus

Using a preparation which allows in vivo observation, the spontaneous behaviour of rat fetuses was recorded on successive days during the last third of gestation (days 16–21) in each of three microenviroments: In Uterus (viewed through the uterine wall), In Amnion (delivered outside the uterus and viewed through the intact amniotic membranes), and In Bath (removed from both uterus and amnion into a benign fluid medium with placental connection intact). These observations provide evidence that the rat fetus exhibits ontogenetic changes in behavioural repertoire, diversity and organization and is reponsive to variations within its environment as development proceeds.

A framework of a cognitive—behavioral theory of leader influence and effectiveness

A theoretical framework in which leader influence is analyzed in terms of factors and processes underlying subordinate work behavior is proposed, and a scheme in which critical hypothesized determinants and paths influencing the work behavior of a subordinate are identified is suggested. Specific behaviors of leader influence are deduced from the scheme and are identified in terms of experiential, cognitive, and mixed approaches to influence. The effects of these behaviors on motivational, learning, and environmental determinants of behavior are examined in light of the operant, cognitive, and social learning literature and the leadership literature. A number of moderator variables determining the boundaries of leader influence are identified. Discussion of the research implications of the proposed framework suggests some new directions for future research regarding the choice of predictor and effectiveness variables and the research procedure most appropriate to tap their relationships.

Book reviews

Book reviewed in this article:Values in Education and Society. By N. Feather.The Human Context. Environmental Determinants of Behaviour. By R. H. Moos.The Illusion of Attitude Change: Toward a Response Contagion Theory of Persuasion. By J. M. Nuttin, Jr.Biofeedback and Self‐Control, 1973. Edited by N. E. Miller, T. X. Barber, L. V. Dicara, J. Kamiya, S. Shapiro and J. Stoyva.Biofeedback and Self‐Control, 1974. Edited by L. V. Dicara, T. X. Barber, J. Kamiya, N. E. Miller, D. Shapiro and J. Stoyva.Social Exchange Theory: Its Structure and Influence in Social Psychology. By J. K. Chadwick‐Jones.The Role of Bodily Feelings in Anxiety. By Peter Tyrer.Investigating Behavior: Principles of Psychology. By O. Desiderato, D. B. Howieson and J. H. Jackson.Clinical Behaviour Therapy. By M. R. Goldfried and G. C. Davison.

The Human Context: Environmental Determinants of Behavior

Back to table of contents Previous article Next article ArticleNo AccessThe Human Context: Environmental Determinants of BehaviorFRED B. CHARATANFRED B. CHARATANSearch for more papers by this authorPublished Online:1 Apr 2006https://doi.org/10.1176/ajp.133.9.1102-aAboutSectionsPDF/EPUB ToolsAdd to favoritesDownload CitationsTrack Citations ShareShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InEmail "The Human Context: Environmental Determinants of Behavior." American Journal of Psychiatry, 133(9), pp. 1102-a–1103 Access content To read the fulltext, please use one of the options below to sign in or purchase access. Personal login Institutional Login Sign in via OpenAthens Purchase Save for later Item saved, go to cart PPV Articles - American Journal of Psychiatry $35.00 Add to cart PPV Articles - American Journal of Psychiatry Checkout Please login/register if you wish to pair your device and check access availability. Not a subscriber? Subscribe Now / Learn More PsychiatryOnline subscription options offer access to the DSM-5 library, books, journals, CME, and patient resources. This all-in-one virtual library provides psychiatrists and mental health professionals with key resources for diagnosis, treatment, research, and professional development. Need more help? PsychiatryOnline Customer Service may be reached by emailing [email protected] or by calling 800-368-5777 (in the U.S.) or 703-907-7322 (outside the U.S.). FiguresReferencesCited byDetailsCited byNone Volume 133Issue 9 September 1976Pages 1102-a-1103 Metrics PDF download History Published online 1 April 2006 Published in print 1 September 1976

Stability and change in the inheritance of behaviour in rats: a further analysis of statistics from a diallel cross.

Measurements made in the open-field test of the ambulation and defecation scores of rats from a 6 x 6 diallel cross were examined for their bearing on the interaction of genetic and environmental determinants of behaviour. The analyses, which were developed especially for this purpose, relate both to developmental stability and change in response to the test situation on 4 successive days. For the first, family variances were used as the variable, and for the second both polynomial components of regression of the individual daily scores as well as heirarchical analysis of variance. Otherwise standard biometrical genetical analyses were employed. The results indicate that, while the stability of open-field defecation and ambulation is influenced during development by genetical determinants largely relating to dominance, there is little evidence of interaction with environment during this time. The analyses of response to test experience, however, show complex relationships which, moreover, differ as between the two aspects of behaviour studied. Some speculations about the evolutionary significance of these results are offered.