The Center for the Study of Health Beliefs and Behavior (Center), directed by Howard Leventhal, PhD and funded by the National Institutes of Health, is an interdisciplinary center integrating health, cognitive and social psychology, with medicine, medical sociology, epidemiology and health policy.  The Center is also a venture that comprises Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey (Rutgers), University of Medicine and Dentistry of New Jersey/Robert Wood Johnson Medical School (UMDNJ/RWJMS), and Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York (MSSM). The objectives of the Center are the following:

• To inform, evaluate, develop, and implement interventions to favorably change health beliefs and behaviors. 
• To improve the bi-directional flow of communication among practitioners, clients, and their families to increase shared decision-making.
• To support studies that will advance a bio-psychosocial approach to mind-body relations in health and translate these finding into innovative and effective health practices.

Center research translates the objectives in the following ways:

• Deepens our understanding of cognitive and affective processes underlying older individuals’ understanding and emotional reactions to their management and experiences with chronic illness and treatment.  This includes the effects of their experiences on function, treatment decisions, self care, social relationships, and end of life decisions. 
• Translates the findings of research based on cognitive/affective science into the clinical context by developing interventions that consider all participants in the management of chronic illness: practitioners, patients, and family members. 
• Develops, tests, and disseminates theory based interventions to increase the overlap of common-sense models of illness and treatments held by patients and family members with valid bio-psychosocial models of illness and treatment.     

The common-sense model of self-regulation (CS/SR) is used as the theoretical framework for integrating factors at the individual, social, institutional, and cultural levels.   Three major Center studies integrate this framework:

• Inferring Patient Illness and Treatment Models: an Expert System
• Representations of Illness and End of Life Planning
• Self Regulation and Self Management among Older Asthmatics

The Center is unique in applying and testing basic ideas from cognitive and social psychological science into actual clinical settings.  Identifying how practitioners can infer patient mental models of illness and treatment and negotiate the differences between patient and medical models will lead to two outcomes: 1) the differentiation of the concepts and processes involved with the CS/SR of illness, and 2) the implementation and testing of clinical interventions to improve self-management of chronic conditions that are innovative, effective, efficient, and applicable in clinical settings. By understanding patients’ mental models of their illnesses and treatments, physicians will be better prepared to prescribe, guide, and evaluate effective treatment.

Rutgers University  |   Mount Sinai School of Medicine  |  University of Medicine & Dentistry of NJ  |  IHHCPAR