Habitual emotional state is a predictor of long-term health and life expectancy and successful em... more Habitual emotional state is a predictor of long-term health and life expectancy and successful emotion regulation is necessary for adaptive functioning. However, people are often unsuccessful in regulating their emotions. We investigated the use of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression in 489 university students in Norway, Australia, and the United States and how these strategies related to measures of well-being (affect, life satisfaction, and depressed mood). Data was collected by means of selfadministered questionnaires. The major aims of the study were to begin to explore the prevalence of use of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression across gender, age and culture, possible antecedents of emotion regulation strategies, and the influence of emotion regulation upon well-being. Results showed that the use of emotion regulation strategies varied across age, gender and culture. Private self-consciousness (self-reflection and insight) was found to be a central antecedent for the use of cognitive reappraisal. Use of emotion regulation strategies predicted well-being outcomes, also after the effect of extraversion and neuroticism had been controlled for. Generally, increased use of cognitive reappraisal predicted increased levels of positive well-being outcomes, while increased use of expressive suppression predicted increased levels of negative well-being outcomes.
This paper describes use of contraception at first intercourse among Norwegian adolescents and sh... more This paper describes use of contraception at first intercourse among Norwegian adolescents and sheds some light upon whether the HIV-epidemic has influenced the use of contraception. The data stem from a population-based survey of 3,000 17-, 18- and 19-year-olds. The response rate was 60.9%. A total of 1,172 persons had experienced intercourse and constitute the material. A total of 42.2% reported having used a condom, 8.5% the p-pill, 17.6% practiced withdrawal, and 31.0% did not use any contraception at their first experience of intercourse. Use/non-use of contraception was associated with educational aspirations, age at first intercourse and consumption of alcohol. Condom use was associated with age, educational aspirations, parental education, consumption of alcohol and discussing contraception with parents and peers. The higher proportion of condom use at first intercourse among the 17-year-olds (47.5%) as compared with the 19-year-olds (34.3%) can probably be ascribed to the HIV-epidemic.
A 6-year longitudinal panel study investigated the absolute and relative stability in depressed m... more A 6-year longitudinal panel study investigated the absolute and relative stability in depressed mood throughout adolescence by reporting data from a sample of 538 adolescents between 13 and 19 years of age. Results revealed the following. (1) Girls had on average higher depressed mood scores than boys at all ages. (2) Among boys there were no substantial changes in depressed mood mean scores, while among girls there was a slight tendency of a curvilinear trend, with a peak level reached in midadolescence. (3) There was a tendency for adolescents to retain their relative level in depressed mood, most pronounced for a period of 4 years, from age 15 to age 19 years. (4) Depressed mood was most stable in a subgroup of adolescents who had high initial depressed mood scores. (5) By applying structural equation modeling, it was shown that the stable (“trait”) component of depressed mood increased in importance with increasing age, while the temporal (“state”) component decreased with increased age.
A number of studies indicate that the prevalence of smoking declined among young Norwegian adults... more A number of studies indicate that the prevalence of smoking declined among young Norwegian adults during the 1960s and 1970s. The present paper shows, however, that this decreasing trend seemed to level out during the 1980s. Hence the total prevalence of smoking in Norway decreased by only two percent units from 1980 to 1993, as compared with approximately 10% in many other European countries. Among persons aged 16-19 years an increased prevalence of smoking has been observed in most recent years. Consequently, in 1995 the smoking prevalences among young males and females were about the same as observed around 1980. These trends in smoking prevalence and use of snuff are discussed with particular reference to the lack of emphasis on preventive measures that has characterised the Norwegian tobacco policy during the last decades; especially that the funds allocated for tobacco-related health education and information were reduced by 90% during the 1980s.
This article presents data on nicotine dependence among daily smokers in Norway in terms of Fager... more This article presents data on nicotine dependence among daily smokers in Norway in terms of Fagerströms Test for Nicotine Dependence (FTND). Nicotine dependence was higher among those smoking hand-rolled cigarettes than among those smoking manufactured cigarettes, in spite of the fact that the average number of cigarettes smoked per day was the same for both groups. The dependence also increased the lower the age of starting to smoke daily. Nicotine dependence was higher among daily smokers with a low level of education than among smokers with a higher level of education. This difference was explained by a difference in the proportion of respondents who smoked hand-rolled cigarettes in the two groups. The data are discussed in light of Norwegian research showing that hand-rolled cigarettes can contain two to three times as much nicotine and tar as manufactured cigarettes. When smokers of hand-rolled cigarettes are less motivated to quit they are exposed to greater health injury than smokers of manufactured cigarettes. The price of (and tax on) a hand-rolled cigarette is about half the price of a manufactured cigarette. Raising the tax on rolling tobacco would be very effective in promoting health and would have the particularly precise effect of reducing the differences in occurrence of disease and premature death among different social groups.
The identification of storage dynamics in remote areas is limited by data scarcity. Both top-down... more The identification of storage dynamics in remote areas is limited by data scarcity. Both top-down and bottom up approaches to identify dominant hydrological processes often fail under these circumstances. In this study, we are combining both approaches in order to test several hypotheses concerning storage dynamics. The upper Xilin catchment, Inner Mongolia, China, is a primary example for such a
Current expectations in biochar products (BC) are numerous, e.g., including improved soil fertili... more Current expectations in biochar products (BC) are numerous, e.g., including improved soil fertility & plant growth, support to combat desertification, and an increase in the carbon sequestration of soils. Costs for biochar production & application must be covered by a positive budget of benefits, which may crucially depend on the residence time (or half life T1/2, yr) of BC in soils. The objective of the present study was to assess the biodegradation rates of BC in different soils by means of a cost-efficient and standardized laboratory method. Investigated BC were from the source material of the C4 plant Miscanthus, and converted via (1) pyrolysis (pyrBC) and (2) hydrothermal carbonization (htcBC). The high-labelling of the educt allowed the quantification of degradation by measurement of the 13CO2 efflux. The pyrBC and htcBC were mixed with four different agricultural soils ranging in texture from sand to loam and in soil organic carbon (SOC) from 0.63% to 2.53%. Four samples of e...
The use of crop models as part of scientific research models or economic farm tools leads to a wi... more The use of crop models as part of scientific research models or economic farm tools leads to a wide range of applications. On the one hand they need to be simple; on the other hand they should be complex enough to simulate a variety of growth mechanisms. The development of entirely new models for different questions requires a lot of coding and work such as changes in the model structure, the inclusion of alternative process descriptions or the implementation of additional functionality. Often, added model components do not really fit to the model philosophy of the originally developed base model. We therefore developed a flexible (modular, generic and mixed procedural object oriented) and integrative (replaceable, expandable, independent and interactive) software tool for the setup of adapted crop models. The Plant growth Modeling Framework (PMF) is based on the Unified Modeling Language and implemented in Python, a high level object-oriented programming language. PMF provides the ...
Today, crop models have a widespread application in natural sciences, because plant growth intera... more Today, crop models have a widespread application in natural sciences, because plant growth interacts and modifies the environment. Transport processes involve water and nutrient uptake from the saturated and unsaturated zone in the pedosphere. Turnover processes include the conversion of dead root biomass into organic matter. Transpiration and the interception of radiation influence the energy exchange between atmosphere and biosphere. But many more feedback mechanisms might be of interest, including erosion, soil compaction or trace gas exchanges. Most of the existing crop models have a closed structure and do not provide interfaces or code design elements for easy data transfer or process exchange with other models during runtime. Changes in the model structure, the inclusion of alternative process descriptions or the implementation of additional functionalities requires a lot of coding. The same is true if models are being upscaled from field to landscape or catchment scale. We t...
Modeling nutrient fluxes in a catchment is a complex and interdisciplinary task. Building and imp... more Modeling nutrient fluxes in a catchment is a complex and interdisciplinary task. Building and improving simulation tools for such complex systems is often constraint by the expertise of the engaged scientists: Since different fields of science are involved like vadose zone and ground water hydrology, plant growth, atmospheric exchange, soil chemistry, soil microbiology, stream physics and stream chemistry, a single work group cannot excel in all parts. As a result, either parts of the system, where no scientist involved is an expert, include rough simplifications, or a "complete" group is too big for maintaining the system over a longer period. However, many approaches exist to create complex models that integrate processes for all sub domains. But a tight integration bears the problem of freezing a specific state of science in the complex system. A model infrastructure, which takes the complex feedback loops across domain boundaries (e.g. soil moisture and plant growth) i...
Communications of the Association for Information Systems
Persuasive technologies pervade much of our everyday lives today in areas from marketing to publi... more Persuasive technologies pervade much of our everyday lives today in areas from marketing to public health. In the latter case, persuasive technology represents a promising area of application. However, we know much too little about how to design effective interventions to support sustained behaviour change and improved well-being. The purpose of the present paper was to contribute in two ways. First, we want to contribute to current practice in designing such interventions. Second, we try to identify key research questions that could be a point of departure for a more detailed and comprehensive future research program. We do this by means of expressing 28 propositions. In sum, the propositions reflect that the construction of digital interventions should be seen as an iterative process which should take into account both content and design factors. However, we argue that intervention research and practical design experience is not just something that follows basic research at a poli...
Any hydrological model designed to reflect our current process understanding implies a plethora o... more Any hydrological model designed to reflect our current process understanding implies a plethora of hypotheses concerning the water transport. Very recently, generic model frameworks, like the Catchment Modelling Framework (CMF) that we present in this study, are available to facilitate the formulation of hypotheses and implementation of processes. With such frameworks, the number of possible model structures, as well as the number of sensitive parameters is only limited by imagination and time of the scientist. But does this help to reject model structures as inappropriate, or is the freedom to create any model structure with its own parameter set just the next level of equifinality? Our study area, the upper Xilin catchment in Inner Mongolia, China, is a large, remote catchment that is poorly gauged. The available data sets are short, incomplete and have a low spatial resolution. Precipitation and other hydrological drivers are highly uncertain in space and time. To understand the ...
Hillslopes are the dominant landscape components where incoming precipitation becomes groundwater... more Hillslopes are the dominant landscape components where incoming precipitation becomes groundwater, streamflow or atmospheric water vapor. However, directly observing flux partitioning in the soil is almost impossible. Hydrological hillslope models are therefore being used to investigate the processes involved. Here we report on a modeling experiment using the Catchment Modeling Framework (CMF) where measured stable water isotopes in vertical soil profiles along a tropical mountainous grassland hillslope transect are traced through the model to resolve potential mixing processes. CMF simulates advective transport of stable water isotopes 18 O and 2 H based on the Richards equation within a fully distributed 2-D representation of the hillslope. The model successfully replicates the observed temporal pattern of soil water isotope profiles (R 2 0.84 and Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) 0.42). Predicted flows are in good agreement with previous studies. We highlight the importance of groundwater recharge and shallow lateral subsurface flow, accounting for 50 and 16 % of the total flow leaving the system, respectively. Surface runoff is negligible despite the steep slopes in the Ecuadorian study region.
We know much too little about how to design effective digital interventions to support sustained ... more We know much too little about how to design effective digital interventions to support sustained behavior change and improved well-being. The purpose of the present paper was to contribute in two ways. First, we want to contribute to current practice in designing such interventions. Second, we try to identify key research questions that could be a point of departure for a more detailed and comprehensive future research program. The propositions we suggest reflect that the construction of digital interventions should be seen as an iterative process which should take into account both "content" and "design" factors. However, we argue that intervention research and practical design experience is not just something that follows basic research at a polite distance, but rather is its inherent complement.
Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Persuasive Technology - Persuasive '09, 2009
We know much too little about how to design effective digital interventions to support sustained ... more We know much too little about how to design effective digital interventions to support sustained behaviour change and improved well-being. The purpose of the present study is to explore whether characteristics and features from social network sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace can be used to facilitate digital interventions for Health Behaviour Change in order to enhance social support and
We are currently developing a digital positive psycho-therapy intervention. The intervention will... more We are currently developing a digital positive psycho-therapy intervention. The intervention will be presented at the 3rd International Conference on Persuasive Technology 2008. By means of installing positive emotions, digital positive psycho-therapy may help prevent ego-depletion and hence increase the chances for successful self-regulation. This may turn out to be an important component in many health behaviour interventions. The current paper discusses some basic insights regarding how digital psychotherapy interventions can be designed and why they hold the potential to make a valuable contribution.
Tidsskrift for den Norske lægeforening : tidsskrift for praktisk medicin, ny række, Jan 20, 1993
This paper reports on knowledge about sexually transmitted diseases in Norwegian adults. The samp... more This paper reports on knowledge about sexually transmitted diseases in Norwegian adults. The sample (572 males and 601 females) was representative of Norwegians aged 15 and above. Data were collected by means of personal interviews and self-completed questionnaires. Out of ten respondents, seven did not know that sexually diseases are not transmitted via toilet seats; six that syphilis is not the most prevalent of the sexually transmitted diseases in Norway; five that both males and females can be infected by chlamydia; four that contraceptive pills do not protect against chlamydia infection; three that condoms protect against all sexually transmitted diseases; and two that condoms protect against gonorrhoea and that females infected by sexually transmitted diseases run higher risk of infertility. Knowledge about sexually transmitted diseases was lowest in the youngest and oldest age groups, and increased monotonously with increased education.
Habitual emotional state is a predictor of long-term health and life expectancy and successful em... more Habitual emotional state is a predictor of long-term health and life expectancy and successful emotion regulation is necessary for adaptive functioning. However, people are often unsuccessful in regulating their emotions. We investigated the use of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression in 489 university students in Norway, Australia, and the United States and how these strategies related to measures of well-being (affect, life satisfaction, and depressed mood). Data was collected by means of selfadministered questionnaires. The major aims of the study were to begin to explore the prevalence of use of cognitive reappraisal and expressive suppression across gender, age and culture, possible antecedents of emotion regulation strategies, and the influence of emotion regulation upon well-being. Results showed that the use of emotion regulation strategies varied across age, gender and culture. Private self-consciousness (self-reflection and insight) was found to be a central antecedent for the use of cognitive reappraisal. Use of emotion regulation strategies predicted well-being outcomes, also after the effect of extraversion and neuroticism had been controlled for. Generally, increased use of cognitive reappraisal predicted increased levels of positive well-being outcomes, while increased use of expressive suppression predicted increased levels of negative well-being outcomes.
This paper describes use of contraception at first intercourse among Norwegian adolescents and sh... more This paper describes use of contraception at first intercourse among Norwegian adolescents and sheds some light upon whether the HIV-epidemic has influenced the use of contraception. The data stem from a population-based survey of 3,000 17-, 18- and 19-year-olds. The response rate was 60.9%. A total of 1,172 persons had experienced intercourse and constitute the material. A total of 42.2% reported having used a condom, 8.5% the p-pill, 17.6% practiced withdrawal, and 31.0% did not use any contraception at their first experience of intercourse. Use/non-use of contraception was associated with educational aspirations, age at first intercourse and consumption of alcohol. Condom use was associated with age, educational aspirations, parental education, consumption of alcohol and discussing contraception with parents and peers. The higher proportion of condom use at first intercourse among the 17-year-olds (47.5%) as compared with the 19-year-olds (34.3%) can probably be ascribed to the HIV-epidemic.
A 6-year longitudinal panel study investigated the absolute and relative stability in depressed m... more A 6-year longitudinal panel study investigated the absolute and relative stability in depressed mood throughout adolescence by reporting data from a sample of 538 adolescents between 13 and 19 years of age. Results revealed the following. (1) Girls had on average higher depressed mood scores than boys at all ages. (2) Among boys there were no substantial changes in depressed mood mean scores, while among girls there was a slight tendency of a curvilinear trend, with a peak level reached in midadolescence. (3) There was a tendency for adolescents to retain their relative level in depressed mood, most pronounced for a period of 4 years, from age 15 to age 19 years. (4) Depressed mood was most stable in a subgroup of adolescents who had high initial depressed mood scores. (5) By applying structural equation modeling, it was shown that the stable (“trait”) component of depressed mood increased in importance with increasing age, while the temporal (“state”) component decreased with increased age.
A number of studies indicate that the prevalence of smoking declined among young Norwegian adults... more A number of studies indicate that the prevalence of smoking declined among young Norwegian adults during the 1960s and 1970s. The present paper shows, however, that this decreasing trend seemed to level out during the 1980s. Hence the total prevalence of smoking in Norway decreased by only two percent units from 1980 to 1993, as compared with approximately 10% in many other European countries. Among persons aged 16-19 years an increased prevalence of smoking has been observed in most recent years. Consequently, in 1995 the smoking prevalences among young males and females were about the same as observed around 1980. These trends in smoking prevalence and use of snuff are discussed with particular reference to the lack of emphasis on preventive measures that has characterised the Norwegian tobacco policy during the last decades; especially that the funds allocated for tobacco-related health education and information were reduced by 90% during the 1980s.
This article presents data on nicotine dependence among daily smokers in Norway in terms of Fager... more This article presents data on nicotine dependence among daily smokers in Norway in terms of Fagerströms Test for Nicotine Dependence (FTND). Nicotine dependence was higher among those smoking hand-rolled cigarettes than among those smoking manufactured cigarettes, in spite of the fact that the average number of cigarettes smoked per day was the same for both groups. The dependence also increased the lower the age of starting to smoke daily. Nicotine dependence was higher among daily smokers with a low level of education than among smokers with a higher level of education. This difference was explained by a difference in the proportion of respondents who smoked hand-rolled cigarettes in the two groups. The data are discussed in light of Norwegian research showing that hand-rolled cigarettes can contain two to three times as much nicotine and tar as manufactured cigarettes. When smokers of hand-rolled cigarettes are less motivated to quit they are exposed to greater health injury than smokers of manufactured cigarettes. The price of (and tax on) a hand-rolled cigarette is about half the price of a manufactured cigarette. Raising the tax on rolling tobacco would be very effective in promoting health and would have the particularly precise effect of reducing the differences in occurrence of disease and premature death among different social groups.
The identification of storage dynamics in remote areas is limited by data scarcity. Both top-down... more The identification of storage dynamics in remote areas is limited by data scarcity. Both top-down and bottom up approaches to identify dominant hydrological processes often fail under these circumstances. In this study, we are combining both approaches in order to test several hypotheses concerning storage dynamics. The upper Xilin catchment, Inner Mongolia, China, is a primary example for such a
Current expectations in biochar products (BC) are numerous, e.g., including improved soil fertili... more Current expectations in biochar products (BC) are numerous, e.g., including improved soil fertility & plant growth, support to combat desertification, and an increase in the carbon sequestration of soils. Costs for biochar production & application must be covered by a positive budget of benefits, which may crucially depend on the residence time (or half life T1/2, yr) of BC in soils. The objective of the present study was to assess the biodegradation rates of BC in different soils by means of a cost-efficient and standardized laboratory method. Investigated BC were from the source material of the C4 plant Miscanthus, and converted via (1) pyrolysis (pyrBC) and (2) hydrothermal carbonization (htcBC). The high-labelling of the educt allowed the quantification of degradation by measurement of the 13CO2 efflux. The pyrBC and htcBC were mixed with four different agricultural soils ranging in texture from sand to loam and in soil organic carbon (SOC) from 0.63% to 2.53%. Four samples of e...
The use of crop models as part of scientific research models or economic farm tools leads to a wi... more The use of crop models as part of scientific research models or economic farm tools leads to a wide range of applications. On the one hand they need to be simple; on the other hand they should be complex enough to simulate a variety of growth mechanisms. The development of entirely new models for different questions requires a lot of coding and work such as changes in the model structure, the inclusion of alternative process descriptions or the implementation of additional functionality. Often, added model components do not really fit to the model philosophy of the originally developed base model. We therefore developed a flexible (modular, generic and mixed procedural object oriented) and integrative (replaceable, expandable, independent and interactive) software tool for the setup of adapted crop models. The Plant growth Modeling Framework (PMF) is based on the Unified Modeling Language and implemented in Python, a high level object-oriented programming language. PMF provides the ...
Today, crop models have a widespread application in natural sciences, because plant growth intera... more Today, crop models have a widespread application in natural sciences, because plant growth interacts and modifies the environment. Transport processes involve water and nutrient uptake from the saturated and unsaturated zone in the pedosphere. Turnover processes include the conversion of dead root biomass into organic matter. Transpiration and the interception of radiation influence the energy exchange between atmosphere and biosphere. But many more feedback mechanisms might be of interest, including erosion, soil compaction or trace gas exchanges. Most of the existing crop models have a closed structure and do not provide interfaces or code design elements for easy data transfer or process exchange with other models during runtime. Changes in the model structure, the inclusion of alternative process descriptions or the implementation of additional functionalities requires a lot of coding. The same is true if models are being upscaled from field to landscape or catchment scale. We t...
Modeling nutrient fluxes in a catchment is a complex and interdisciplinary task. Building and imp... more Modeling nutrient fluxes in a catchment is a complex and interdisciplinary task. Building and improving simulation tools for such complex systems is often constraint by the expertise of the engaged scientists: Since different fields of science are involved like vadose zone and ground water hydrology, plant growth, atmospheric exchange, soil chemistry, soil microbiology, stream physics and stream chemistry, a single work group cannot excel in all parts. As a result, either parts of the system, where no scientist involved is an expert, include rough simplifications, or a "complete" group is too big for maintaining the system over a longer period. However, many approaches exist to create complex models that integrate processes for all sub domains. But a tight integration bears the problem of freezing a specific state of science in the complex system. A model infrastructure, which takes the complex feedback loops across domain boundaries (e.g. soil moisture and plant growth) i...
Communications of the Association for Information Systems
Persuasive technologies pervade much of our everyday lives today in areas from marketing to publi... more Persuasive technologies pervade much of our everyday lives today in areas from marketing to public health. In the latter case, persuasive technology represents a promising area of application. However, we know much too little about how to design effective interventions to support sustained behaviour change and improved well-being. The purpose of the present paper was to contribute in two ways. First, we want to contribute to current practice in designing such interventions. Second, we try to identify key research questions that could be a point of departure for a more detailed and comprehensive future research program. We do this by means of expressing 28 propositions. In sum, the propositions reflect that the construction of digital interventions should be seen as an iterative process which should take into account both content and design factors. However, we argue that intervention research and practical design experience is not just something that follows basic research at a poli...
Any hydrological model designed to reflect our current process understanding implies a plethora o... more Any hydrological model designed to reflect our current process understanding implies a plethora of hypotheses concerning the water transport. Very recently, generic model frameworks, like the Catchment Modelling Framework (CMF) that we present in this study, are available to facilitate the formulation of hypotheses and implementation of processes. With such frameworks, the number of possible model structures, as well as the number of sensitive parameters is only limited by imagination and time of the scientist. But does this help to reject model structures as inappropriate, or is the freedom to create any model structure with its own parameter set just the next level of equifinality? Our study area, the upper Xilin catchment in Inner Mongolia, China, is a large, remote catchment that is poorly gauged. The available data sets are short, incomplete and have a low spatial resolution. Precipitation and other hydrological drivers are highly uncertain in space and time. To understand the ...
Hillslopes are the dominant landscape components where incoming precipitation becomes groundwater... more Hillslopes are the dominant landscape components where incoming precipitation becomes groundwater, streamflow or atmospheric water vapor. However, directly observing flux partitioning in the soil is almost impossible. Hydrological hillslope models are therefore being used to investigate the processes involved. Here we report on a modeling experiment using the Catchment Modeling Framework (CMF) where measured stable water isotopes in vertical soil profiles along a tropical mountainous grassland hillslope transect are traced through the model to resolve potential mixing processes. CMF simulates advective transport of stable water isotopes 18 O and 2 H based on the Richards equation within a fully distributed 2-D representation of the hillslope. The model successfully replicates the observed temporal pattern of soil water isotope profiles (R 2 0.84 and Nash-Sutcliffe efficiency (NSE) 0.42). Predicted flows are in good agreement with previous studies. We highlight the importance of groundwater recharge and shallow lateral subsurface flow, accounting for 50 and 16 % of the total flow leaving the system, respectively. Surface runoff is negligible despite the steep slopes in the Ecuadorian study region.
We know much too little about how to design effective digital interventions to support sustained ... more We know much too little about how to design effective digital interventions to support sustained behavior change and improved well-being. The purpose of the present paper was to contribute in two ways. First, we want to contribute to current practice in designing such interventions. Second, we try to identify key research questions that could be a point of departure for a more detailed and comprehensive future research program. The propositions we suggest reflect that the construction of digital interventions should be seen as an iterative process which should take into account both "content" and "design" factors. However, we argue that intervention research and practical design experience is not just something that follows basic research at a polite distance, but rather is its inherent complement.
Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Persuasive Technology - Persuasive '09, 2009
We know much too little about how to design effective digital interventions to support sustained ... more We know much too little about how to design effective digital interventions to support sustained behaviour change and improved well-being. The purpose of the present study is to explore whether characteristics and features from social network sites like Facebook, Twitter and MySpace can be used to facilitate digital interventions for Health Behaviour Change in order to enhance social support and
We are currently developing a digital positive psycho-therapy intervention. The intervention will... more We are currently developing a digital positive psycho-therapy intervention. The intervention will be presented at the 3rd International Conference on Persuasive Technology 2008. By means of installing positive emotions, digital positive psycho-therapy may help prevent ego-depletion and hence increase the chances for successful self-regulation. This may turn out to be an important component in many health behaviour interventions. The current paper discusses some basic insights regarding how digital psychotherapy interventions can be designed and why they hold the potential to make a valuable contribution.
Tidsskrift for den Norske lægeforening : tidsskrift for praktisk medicin, ny række, Jan 20, 1993
This paper reports on knowledge about sexually transmitted diseases in Norwegian adults. The samp... more This paper reports on knowledge about sexually transmitted diseases in Norwegian adults. The sample (572 males and 601 females) was representative of Norwegians aged 15 and above. Data were collected by means of personal interviews and self-completed questionnaires. Out of ten respondents, seven did not know that sexually diseases are not transmitted via toilet seats; six that syphilis is not the most prevalent of the sexually transmitted diseases in Norway; five that both males and females can be infected by chlamydia; four that contraceptive pills do not protect against chlamydia infection; three that condoms protect against all sexually transmitted diseases; and two that condoms protect against gonorrhoea and that females infected by sexually transmitted diseases run higher risk of infertility. Knowledge about sexually transmitted diseases was lowest in the youngest and oldest age groups, and increased monotonously with increased education.
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Papers by Pal Kraft