Understanding Habits with Basic Research

How can we more effectively break unhelpful habits?
What are the circumstances that strengthen habits we want to keep?
Are habits operant behavior, or respondent?

The most essential activities of our daily lives are experienced with automated chained responses. Understanding habits allows us to strengthen helpful habits and weaken the responses we are wanting to change. A recent issue of the Journal of Experimental Analysis of Behavior (January 2024) was dedicated to organizing the basic research on habit responses so that the findings may be more readily utilized in applied contexts. Whether it is for you, your employees, or your client, the findings of applied research have relevance to the habit behaviors of everyday life.

This is an article course. While there is additional content and exercises supporting the article’s content, the article Handel and Smith (2024) provides the primary content for this course.

Reference:

Handel, S.N. & Smith, R.J. (2024). Making and breaking habits: Revisiting the definitions and behavioral factors that influence habits in animals. Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, 121(1), 3-7. https://doi.org/10.1002/jeab.889

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This course is 4 General CEUs and is designed to take 3 hours and 20 minutes.

If more time is needed, an additional reading is provided at the end of the course. Users are asked to verify their time spent in the survey at the end of the course. Please be sure to complete this survey