Workshops
Workshop 1
Developing habit-based interventions for health and sustainability
Prof. Dr. Ben Gardner
Behaviour change interventions often fail to have long-lasting effects, because people lose the motivation to continue, and lapse back into ingrained patterns of behaviour. Making desirable behaviours habitual – that is, ensuring they are automatically prompted when environmental cues are encountered – encourages persistent behaviour when conscious motivation may otherwise erode, while breaking ‘bad’ habits can prevent lapses back into old ways. This workshop focuses on how to make and break habits, to promote health or sustainability behaviours. In recognition that forming or disrupting cue-behaviour associations alone is insufficient to change behaviour, the workshop guides participants through a step-by-step method that moves from an understanding of the behavioural problem, through to building the motivation and volition needed to change, to targeting changes in context-specific habits to maintain behaviour change.
Workshop 2
When Theories Lead the Data: Rethinking Automaticity in Emotional Processing
Prof. Dr. Giovanni Mirabella
Often in science, when a theory becomes dominant, even researchers, who are expected to be objective, tend to favor confirmatory evidence, with positive findings more likely to be published and negative results remaining underreported (Franco et al., 2014, Munafò et al., 2017, Open Science Collaboration, 2015). This concern is particularly relevant to the influential view that emotional stimuli bypass attentional control and elicit rapid, automatic behavioral responses, an assumption often grounded in evolutionary accounts of adaptive behavior (Vuilleumier, 2005). Such ideas are central to motivational models that have shaped affective science over the past decades (Bradley et al., 2001, Lang and Bradley, 2010, Lang et al., 1997). However, a closer inspection of the literature suggests a more nuanced picture (Mirabella and Montalti, 2025). Rather than supporting fully automatic responses, many findings indicate that the behavioral impact of emotional stimuli depends on their relevance to the individual’s current goals and task demands (see also Mirabella et al., 2024a, Mirabella et al., 2023, Mirabella et al., 2024b, Montalti and Mirabella, 2023, Montalti and Mirabella, 2024).
In this workshop, participants will critically examine this issue by:
- Conducting a systematic search using major databases (e.g., PubMed, Scopus) to identify studies investigating behavioral effects of emotional stimuli in widely used paradigms (e.g., stop-signal tasks, visual search);
- Evaluating the methodological quality of these studies;
- Synthesizing and discussing the evidence to assess the extent to which it supports or challenges the automaticity account.
