Our environments can have profound influences on our health behaviors and practices. The cues we encounter in our daily lives can affect what and how much food we consume, whether or not we adhere to health advice, and even how we prioritize or construe our health goals. Furthermore, environmental factors can interact with individual differences in physiology, psychology, and behavior to produce differential effects on health and well-being. In this speaker series, we offer different perspectives on how and why environmental factors and individual differences influence health behaviors, and suggest potential intervention points to help people overcome a variety of obstacles to achieving better health.

Highly palatable, highly processed foods are widely accessible, affordable, and available in large portion sizes. Could these foods also be addictive? A growing body of evidence suggests that certain foods may be capable of triggering an addictive process, especially in vulnerable individuals. The current talk will review the evidence for “food addiction” and will highlight questions that need to be investigated to further evaluate the role of an addictive process in problematic eating.

Exercising regularly, getting enough sleep, eating more fruits and veggies – we all know these things are good for us. If we brainstormed for a minute, or less, we’d probably have a long list of sound, logical, rational reasons why we should do them. And yet it’s just so darn hard to sustain them, isn’t it? It turns out that the most common logical-based reasons for behavior change tend to keep people stuck in cycles of starting and stopping, instead of sustaining. Attend this presentation if you are curious about this phenomenon and its surprising intersection of culture and motivation, and want to learn an alternative science-based approach to motivating and maintaining healthy behaviors in ways that can also foster personal meaning and wellbeing. Michelle Segar, PhD, MPH, motivation scientist and author of critically acclaimed “No Sweat: How the Simple Science of Motivation Can Bring You a Lifetime of Fitness,” directs the UM Sport, Health, and Activity Research and Policy (SHARP) Center.

This talk summarizes select theory and research findings from an ongoing examination of family and community predictors of early childhood obesity begun as the STRONG Kids Program at the University of Illinois in 2008 and extended to the University of Michigan in 2011. The six-Cs ecological model of predictors of child energy intake and output is offered as a foundational framework, followed by select findings from research on families of preschoolers in Illinois and Michigan regarding the role of commercial media exposure in child dietary intake and developing healthy-meal schemas.

Can negative emotions be considered the “canary in the coal mine,” an early warning sign of poor health to come? Individuals prone to distress appear to be more vulnerable to cardiovascular disease, and such predispositions may emerge early and persist over the life course. We will consider the evidence that negative emotions influence heart health and think about how early in the life course such effects could be set into motion. We will also discuss biological and behavioral mechanisms underlying this relationship, considering how these processes may operate across the life course.

I will discuss my research on psychological aspects of the porous divide between the physical and the mental, including the knowledge bases used to make these rudimentary determinations. A first series of studies explores chronic differences in the dominance of mental and physical experiences, the social and individual sources of physical or mental attributions, and cultural and health implications of these judgments. A second series concerns how overlap in the contents of mental intentions and physical behavior can yield false memories for behavior: The mistaken belief of having enacted a behavior when the behavior was merely intended. These false memories are more prevalent when decision encoding is difficult, when gist (vs. detailed) processing is involved, and when intention-behavior confusability is high. Implications for health interventions and medication adherence are discussed.

Many strategies designed to address adolescent obesity fail to take into account that youth with obesity are far more likely than their healthy weight peers to experience body dissatisfaction, be highly concerned with their weight, to engage in binge eating, and to use unhealthy weight control behaviors. This talk will examine somewhat counterintuitive findings related to body satisfaction and weight misperception among adolescents with obesity and will include a discussion of best practices for addressing the intersection of weight-related disorders among youth.