Testing a Self-Affirmation Intervention to Improve Healthy Eating Behavior in Mothers of Elementary School Children

Despite the value of healthy eating, many Americans engage in poor eating, including eating much more than the recommended daily intake of sodium, and less than the recommended daily amounts of fruits, vegetables, and whole grains. Public education increases knowledge about health, yet often fails to motivate healthier behavior. Many people persist in unhealthy habits despite knowledge of healthy lifestyle choices. Clearly, mere dissemination of information has not solved this public health crisis. However, health information combined with targeted application of psychological principles surrounding behavior change holds much promise for improving health. An emergent approach for an eating intervention grounded in theories of behavior change derives from self-affirmation theory. Self-affirmation theory suggests that threatening health-related information is processed defensively (i.e., ignored or rationalized away) as a means of maintaining the integrity of an indiviudal’s self-worth. Self-affirmation interventions work by bolstering the individual’s self-worth in a personally relevant domain prior to exposure to a threatening stimulus. This allows the individual to attend to the threatening information while maintaining their global self-worth and integrity. The current study aims to apply a self-affirmation intervention to a community sample of mothers of elementary school children in order to improve their healthy eating behaviors and the food they purchase for the home environment.