Workgroup notes with Personality, Clinical and Health Psychology at the Leiden University - 2018/2019

Week 1 - Workgroup Tips

Unconscious behaviour = automatisms

• 95% of our behaviour. This is simply routine behaviour, which is context/stimulus-driven. This means that something in your surrounding simply activates this behaviour, such as coughing after inhaling smoke from a fire.

• It is a result of conditioning or associations.

Conscious behaviour = planned behaviour

• 5% of our behaviour. It is the result of what we plan to do. It takes into account our assessment of our own abilities and  what we think other people will think of our behaviour.

• Antecedents are stimuli that precede behaviour. They are a signal to our brain to instigate (start) a certain behaviour. Antecedents can take the form of events, people, feelings, thoughts, etc.

• There are three types of antecedents, beliefs, interpretations and self-convictions.

Starting assignment

1.  Describe one negative behaviour of your own that you’d like to work on (or should work on) over the next few weeks. It must be a behaviour that currently has a negative effect on your life or a behaviour that prevents a positive effect that you would actually like. The behaviour must also occur regularly (at least twice a week).  Tip: If you can’t think of anything that would be good to change, you can ask someone else (who knows you well): perhaps he/she has noticed an area where you could / should change your behaviour.

2. Formulate one sentence that expresses what you want to change: “I want to……..”. Your description of the behaviour should be measurable (state how often the behaviour may/must occur within a specific time period), active (describe what you will do, not what you will refrain from doing) and personal (describe what you are going to change, not what other people should do). Together, these three terms stand for MAP.

3. Describe why changing this behaviour is important for you.

   1. What is making you tackle it right now, at this time?

   2. What do you want to achieve, and why?

   3. What is your motivation to change?

4. Now think about your current behaviour. Describe at least 4 antecedents and 4 consequences of your current undesirable behaviour. Antecedents can be events, feelings,thoughts and/or behaviours.

Example

• Behaviour 1: I intentionally isolate myself from friends and family, and then proceed to beat myself up over it. I make the conscious decision to exclude myself from certain social situations and then

• Antecedent: I give into the urge to be alone. Consequence: I feel worse because I am alone.

• Antecedent: I supress my creativity. Consequence: My head starts running a mile a minute.

• Antecedent: I am having a stressful week/period. Consequence: I get snappy to other people.

The Anti-assignment, a recipe for disaster

• Explanation: This assignment urges you to make a list, on the basis of your experience, of all the steps that you must take in order to make yourself UNHAPPY, and then you might find that it is a little harder to keep falling into the same traps so easily. Writing a recipe of this kind makes you aware of your own traps (e.g. antecedents) so you can avoid them in the future.

• Here follows an example of such a recipe, in this case for antisocial behaviour. Important is that during the entirety of this recipe, you are not, under any circumstance, to reach out to your friends or family and talk about what is going on. Unless it is to falsely complain about something annoying or frustration said friends or family did.

  • The best place to start is during a stressful, or busy week. A combination of both would be even better. Little sleep and a lot of responsibilities also do wonders. Then, the first step is to intently listen to one of your friends telling you something about what they did with some other friends of yours. Completely ignore that they’re talking about that game you hate or that movie series you dislike, on  day that you wouldn’t have been able to join anyway, and immediately assume that they didn’t ask you because they didn’t want you there.

  • Keep that thought in mind and react disinterested and rude to your friend. Watch their face become confused and hurt and get angry at yourself. They did not deserve what you just said to them.

  • The next step comes when there is a small encounter with a friend coming up. It can be going for coffee or riding the bus together. Come up with a ridiculous excuse why you can’t make it and carry through with it, or find something else to do and then wind up being too late for the event.

  • Then, isolate yourself from your family. Be short and rude to them and lock yourself in your bed room at any possible moment. Come down for dinner but don’t say a word. If you do say something, make sure it is something so harsh it starts a discussion. Get your parents into a fight. Then be mad about your own behaviour and beat yourself up over it.

  • Your thoughts are speeding up and going wild, that’s good! Be sure to tell yourself you are stupid and ugly, procrastinate everything that needs to be done and do not, I repeat, do not give in to any creative urges. Eat junk food all day and skip workouts – that will surely get you to feel worse.

  • Push yourself to the brink and then over, right until your head gets completely quiet and thinking and focussing comes difficult. You’ll know you have succeeded when you find yourself crying in the shower or screaming into a pillow, just to drive the quiet away for a moment.

Assignment

Write your own ‘recipe for disaster’ (max. 750 words). Describe step‐by‐step what you MUST do to make sure that you go back to that behaviour that you particularly don’t want.

In short: What must you do to ensure that your good intentions are a total failure?

Week 2 - Workgroup Tips

Working on recording your behaviour can give you insight into frequency, time, place, patterns or changes. Below you can find a recording table, that shows you certain questions you can ask yourself about your behaviour.

Assignment: Looking back on behaviour

Take a look back at your description of the behaviour that you’ve chosen to change. How would you like to make any adjustments in it?

1. See if you want to adjust your behaviour goal (I want to….). Where your behaviour goal is not entirely described in MAP terms, reformulate your goal.
2. Check that your behaviour goal is measurable, active and personal (MAP), and that it occurs regularly (preferably at least a couple of times a week). Explain why each of the terms (measurable, active, personal) applies for this behaviour goal.

Assignment: How to record behaviour

In the last assignment you thought about a specific behaviour. The intention is that over the next few weeks you will keep a record of this behaviour. For now, you will only keep a record (=careful observation); you do not need to change anything whatsoever about it yet.

State how you are going to record this behaviour. The table below gives an example of how this type of recording works.

Answer the following questions:

a. What are you going to record? Think of what could be useful to record: Minutes? Number of times? Units? But you should certainly also consider thoughts, feelings, circumstances and stuff like that.

b. When will you record? How often? Will it be on fixed moments por randomly?

c. How will you remind yourself to keep a record and will you be least likely to forget it?

Week 3 - Workgroup Tips

When trying to change you antecedents, there are several things you can try.

• Avoidance à Making sure there is no way the behaviour can occur. You can’t eat cookies if there aren’t any cookies in the house.
• Limiting à Setting certain times or certain numbers you are allowed. You are for instance only allowed to check your messages on whole and half hours.
• Change antecedent cognitions à Changing the way you think about your behaviour. Instead of that scratching relieves your itch, think about how scratching injured your skin.
• Take a break à Stop yourself just before or during the behaviour and consciously think about what you are doing
• Severity assessment à How bad is it what I am doing right now?
• Breaking the chain reaction à If you don’t eat the first cookie, you won’t end up eating the whole pack and feeling bad about yourself

Assignment: Implementing change

The aim is that you choose a behaviour of someone else that you could hypothetically change. The behaviour that you choose should be something quite small (such as switching the light off, bringing you a cup of tea, no longer leaving his/her coat lying around on the sofa, taking the dog for a walk, etc.). You don’t have to follow through with changing the behaviour (I, the author, for instance didn’t feel like it was ethically right, so I didn’t), but you will need to make a plan of how you would hypothetically do it.  

Describe in max. 750 words how you will change someone’s behaviour.

Example

Subject: My little brother, Jay

Behaviour: Leaving his breakfast stuff on the table and me having to clean it up.

Weakness/changing point: FOOD and household chores

Plan

• Techniques:

  • (Negative reinforcement) taking over his vacuuming or dishwasher chores eventually.

  • (Cues) ask him to do it before I leave the house.

  • (Shaping absence) Praise the hell out of him and bring home food when he actually did clean.

• Step 1: Ask him to clear away his cup if he is standing up anyway. If he looks hesitant about it, promise him food for doing it.

• Step 2: Once he starts clearing away his cup, tell him that if he clears away his breakfast stuff before you leave (breadknife, cheese, plate, peanut butter, etc.) that you will take over his chore of the day (vacuuming or the dishwasher). Thank him if he actually does it and bring home food at the end of the day.

• Step 3: Frequently reinforce how thankful you are for him clearing away his mess. Give him a hug if he did it without you having to ask. Give him more food.

Assignment: Change yourself  

Now you’ve have objectively looked at someone else, try to look at yourself in the same way and make a similar plan

1. Describe how you would change your old antecedents

2. Describe if and  how you would create new antecedents.

3. Describe how you will deal with ‘moments of crisis’, do you have people that can help you or do you have some other way to help yourself out?

4. Describe what will help you to keep up this behaviour change (rewards, agreements with other people).

5. Produce a plan to achieve your behaviour change.

Write a max. of 750 words.

Example

a. Antecedent: ignoring my creative impulses

1. Change: carry a notebook around. Note down in short hand creative ideas or lines. Free up an evening of the week to work out creative things.

2. Antecedent: I believe people do not want to hang out with me because I am not worth spending time with.

3. Change: Take a breathing moment. Go over the times when people really wanted me to be with them and went out of their way to make sure I could. Possible reach out to the friends in question to let them know what is going on in your head.

4. Antecedent: I get annoyed by people talking to me when I am busy.

5. Change: supress initial response because you know it is going to be rude and snappy. Analyse whether you have a right to be annoyed (probably not), then reply politely and explain that your head is a mess.

b. New antecedents

1. Listening to your ‘cheer up playlist’ when you feel tempted to turn antisocial

2. Text your best friend when you start feeling like shit.

3. Hug your mum. You already know she won’t ask questions and you will feel better.

c. Reach out to your best friend or mother.

They both know what can occasionally happen inside your head and you know that they can talk you out of it. Explain what the antecedent was that got you here and ask them for help. Push aside your pride.

d. The day after you reached out, you are allowed to buy a chocolate bar and eat it over the course of the day.

This will help you recover from being lost in your head AND feel like a reward.

e. Follow the four steps

1. Step 1. Negative punishment, for every time you think about performing antisocial behaviour, put 1 euro in the glass pot on your desk. For every time you actually go through with is, 5 euros.

2. Step 2. Train Incompatible behaviour. For every time an anti-social thought arises, reach out to a friend. This can be in person or over text, but attempt making a social interaction. This is incompatible with the anti-social behaviour, thus preventing it from occurring.

3. Step 3. Shaping absence, remind yourself of how good it is when you’ve gone a while without any antisocial tendencies. Buy yourself something nice. For every two weeks without the actual behaviour, use the money from the anti-behaviour jar to get yourself chocolate.

4. Step 4. Extinction. Try not to focus on the anti-social past as social interactions become more natural. Let it fade away by itself as you become more used to being social.

Week 4 - Workgroup Tips

Working with the Kate Pryor book ‘Don’t shoot the dog!’, here are 8 methods to deal with or change behaviour.

• Shoot the animal à Make sure the behaviour can never occur again. Change roommates, get a divorce, shoot your dog.

• Punishment à Punish the person or animal that has wrong behaviour. Steal your roommate’s food, put salt in your spouse’s coffee, hit your dog.

• Negative Reinforcement à Every time the behaviour occurs, do something annoying. Play the music your roommate doesn’t like, don’t listen to your spouse, shout at your dog.

• Extinction à Behaviour that dies down by lack of reinforcer, in other words, do nothing. Simply leave your roommate’s dirty underwear on the floor, ignore your spouse, ignore your dog.

• Train an incompatible behaviour à Train two behaviours that cannot occur at the same time. Reward roommate for putting laundry in the laundry basket, make a nice atmosphere so if spouse comes home, the bad mood disappears, train dog to wait in the hallway so it doesn’t go around the house all muddy.

• Put the behaviour on cue à Make it so the behaviour appears only when you say so. Have a laundry fight with your roommate, make a deal with spouse to each bitch about your day for five minutes before not mentioning it again, train dog to walk to his/her place right away and stay there for a bit.

• Shape the absence à Do special or pleasant things when the behaviour doesn’t occur. (almost like bribery ;0 ) Buy beer when the roommate cleans after themselves, have a nice dinner when the spouse comes home in a good mood, give the dog treats when he doesn’t run around the house all muddy.

• Change the motivation à Figure out why the behaviour happens and makes sure it cannot occur again. Hire a maid to clean up after you and your roommate, encourage a change of your spouse’s job, make sure the dog is clean and dry before allowing it inside the house.

Watch the following clips: The Ineffective Youth Minister With a High-Risk Teen: Non-Motivational Approach

• https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=25jUW52zAvU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wSrpYVszdms

Assignment: Motivate yourself

In this assignment you will try to find your own motivation.

a. What can or does motivate you to change or hold you back from changing?

b. What can increase your motivation or make your motivation disappear?

c. What do you think you will gain once you change your behaviour? What are you afraid of losing? Why? In other words, make a pro and con list for changing.

Week 5 - Workgroup Tips

How to prevent crisis moments:

• Place cards or stickers with your reminders in places where you either might need them or will see them often.
• Visualise a difficult situation in detail and within that situation, identify the things that might act as a trigger for your intention, then come up with a way to deal with those triggers, or avoid them altogether.

• Social support: let the people in your environment of your intentions and plans so they can remind you of it, help you if needed and be understanding when you do something that strikes them as odd

Recognising a crisis à Identify for yourself what would exactly occur when you are in crisis and make sure you memorise them, so that once you are down at your lowest low, you can recognise certain patterns of behaviour and stop yourself.

Dealing with crisis à Remember that it is okay to enlist help. Make sure there is someone you can talk to when you are in crisis who understands and come up with ways you or them can help you get out of that low point you are at. It is not bad to relapse in bad behaviour as long as you get back out of it again.

Assignment: HELP, CRISIS!

1. What are the helpful resources that you can use as tools to prevent a moment of crisis?

2. How will you recognise that you are in crisis?

3. How will you help yourself if you are in crisis?

Week 6 - Workgroup Tips

In psychology, motivation conversation and/or interview are something that can occur on a regular basis. Here are some tips about doing motivational interviews

Assignment: The interview pt. 1

Imagine having an interview with someone who eats to much when they are watching television at night.

1. What topics or matters do you expect your coachee to talk about?

2. What interview techniques would you use to motivate them?

3. What would you ask to give answer to the following questions

   1. What is the current situation?

   2. How would you describe their motivation?

   3. What situations has your coachee encountered, and how have they dealt with them?

   4. How are they prepared for ‘moments of crisis’ that may occur?

Assignment: The interview pt. 2

Imagine being interviewed about your behaviour.

1. What would you expect your coach to ask?

2. Which questions or topics would you be resistant to talk about?

3. Why?

4. Do you think being coached would help you? Why (not)?

Information on Week 7 and 8

During week 7 and 8, there was no new information aside of confidential discussion. Because of privacy reasons of the persons in question, this can abviously not be posted.

Other than that, perform an evaluation of your behaviour change. Keep in mind the following things:

1. Did you actually make the goal you had set for yourself? If no, why not?

2. In the hindsight, what should/could you have done different?

3. Are you going to continue the behaviour change?

4. Why (not)?

GOOD LUCK ON THE EXAM!!