Center of Alcohol Studies, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, Piscataway, New Jersey.
Department of Kinesiology and Health, Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, New Brunswick, New Jersey.
J Stud Alcohol Drugs. 2018 Mar;79(2):229-238. doi: 10.15288/jsad.2018.79.229.
It has been nearly 15 years since Kazdin and Nock published methodological and research recommendations for understanding mechanisms of change in child and adolescent therapy. Their arguments and enthusiasm for research on mechanisms of behavior change (MOBCs) resonated across disciplines and disorders, as it shined a light on the crucial importance of understanding how and for whom treatments instigate behavior change and how therapeutic mechanisms might be extended to "situations and settings of everyday life." Initial efforts focused on how psychotherapy works and linear models, yet the use of theory to guide the study of mechanisms, and laboratory experiments to manipulate them, is broadly applicable.
This article considers dynamic physiological processes that support behavior change. Specifically, it examines the utility of psychophysiological methods to measure and promote behavior change. Moreover, it embeds the baroreflex mechanism, a well-defined heart-brain feedback loop, within the theories and strategies of MOBC research.
Individuals' subjective and expressive experience of change does not always align with their physiological reactivity. Thus, behavior change may be best understood when concurrently assessed across multiple biobehavioral levels. Further, behavior is initiated in the moment, often before conscious deliberation, suggesting that multilevel behavior change research may benefit from real-time methodological designs. Last, substance use trajectories vary widely, suggesting that different MOBCs are more or less active in individuals depending on their personal constituency and the functional need that their substance use serves; thus, methods that are amenable to personalized modeling approaches are important.
自 Kazdin 和 Nock 发表关于理解儿童和青少年治疗中变化机制的方法学和研究建议以来，已经过去了近 15 年。他们关于行为改变机制（MOBC）的研究的论点和热情在不同学科和障碍中引起了共鸣，因为它强调了理解治疗如何引发行为改变以及治疗机制如何扩展到“日常生活中的情况和环境”的重要性。最初的努力集中在心理治疗如何起作用和线性模型上，但理论在指导机制研究以及实验室实验来操纵机制方面的应用是广泛的。
本文考虑了支持行为改变的动态生理过程。具体来说，它考察了心理生理学方法在测量和促进行为改变方面的效用。此外，它将血压反射机制，即明确的心脏-大脑反馈回路，嵌入到 MOBC 研究的理论和策略中。
个体对变化的主观和表达体验并不总是与他们的生理反应一致。因此，当从多个生物行为水平同时评估时，行为改变可能更容易理解。此外，行为是在当下发起的，通常在有意识的思考之前，这表明多水平行为改变研究可能受益于实时方法设计。最后，物质使用轨迹差异很大，这表明不同的 MOBC 在个体中的活跃程度取决于他们的个人组成和他们的物质使用所服务的功能需求；因此，易于采用个性化建模方法的方法很重要。
