Students Win Awards for Studies based on TMT

This week I'm sharing an article from our CU College of Nursing press office, recognizing two students doing research that's connected to Two Minds Theory: http://www.ucdenver.edu/academics/colleges/nursing/about-us/news/Pages/2019/Poster-presentation-covers-it-all.aspx

Two of my students won awards for their poster presentations at the College's research symposium, one for a study of trauma and chronic pain in patients with opioid use disorders, and the other for a study of Intuitive-level variables that predict medication adherence in patients with HIV. Both are topics that I have posted about previously on the blog (HIV treatment adherence here; opioid use disorders here and here), and each is the focus of ongoing research at the college.

The college posted copies of Linda Driscoll Powers's poster on chronic pain and trauma in patients with opioid use (2nd place winner), and Nasser Al-Salmi's poster on predictors of HIV medication adherence (3rd place winner). Nasser is a PhD student at the college, and Linda is in our BSN Honors program that gives nursing students a chance to conduct original research while getting their undergraduate degrees. Congratulations to them both!

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Prototypes and Willingness: The Theory of Planned Behavior Revisited

You may recall my blog post from last year on the Theory of Planned Behavior (TPB) , titled "in praise of a failed model." My evaluation of this model was that it accurately describes the Narrative Mind, which does control intentions. But the ultimate goal of the TPB is to predict behavior, and the relationship between intentions and behavior is weak at best -- in fact, it is entirely attributable to the fact that when someone says they don't intend to do something, they probably won't do it. When they say they do intend to do it, their actual results are no better than chance, a result of the intention-behavior gap as described in Two Minds Theory. The full TPB is shown in this diagram: Cognitive constructs like attitudes, subjective norms, and perceived behavioral control (i.e., self-efficacy) are Narrative-system phenomena, and they do indeed have relationships with each other and with intentions (which are also products of the Narrative Mind). Perceived behavi...

Leventhal's Common-Sense Model and Two Minds Theory

Leventhal, Diefenbach, and Leventhal's (1992) "common sense model" of self-regulation. My 2018 paper describing Two Minds Theory (TMT) cites work by my colleague and coauthor Dr. Paula Meek, who conducted studies of patients experiencing the symptom of breathlessness due to chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder (COPD). Paula's research used a model by Howard and Elaine Leventhal (with Michael Diefenbach) that was an early iteration of the dual-process approach also used in TMT. She found that people who focused their attention on different aspects of the feeling of breathlessness then in turn had different interpretations of what that symptom meant for them, and that those interpretations changed their perception of the symptom's intensity. This example illustrates a back-and-forth between perceptions and thoughts, which is characteristic of Leventhal's model. Leventhal's dual-process model, sometimes called the "common sense model" of self-reg...

Intuitive Decision-Making by People with Diabetes

People with diabetes often find it challenging to maintain their blood sugar levels, in part because diabetes is a complicated disease. When the kidneys don't produce enough insulin fast enough to adjust for changes in digestion or activity, blood sugar can fluctuate rapidly, even over the course of a single day. To manage this, people with diabetes often need to make changes in multiple areas: adopting a low-carbohydrate diet, managing the timing and amount of exercise they get, keeping track of the times when their blood sugar rises and falls, potentially giving themselves a dose of insulin around mealtimes, managing stress, and other preventive measures as well. But despite all of this complexity, the people who manage their diabetes most successfully are often the least obsessive about the fine details. When my Dad was first diagnosed with diabetes, he checked his blood sugar often (using finger sticks; continuous glucose monitoring [CGM] devices weren’t yet a thing). Bu...

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