Efectos de las intenciones de implementación en las intervenciones sobre la salud

Abstract

In the past decade, implementation intentions have consistently been shown to be effective self-regulatory tools in a multitude of studies (Gollwitzer & Sheeran, 2006). In this article, we will review their effectiveness in the health domain. Thus, by forming implementation intentions it is possible to foster the promotion of healthy (healthy eating, physical exercise) and unpleasant behaviors (home blood glucose monitoring or self-examinations), as well as the control of unwanted influences and the promotion of goal attainment in critical populations that have difficulties with action control (such as schizophrenics and children with ADHD). Moreover, recent research on the costs of action control by implementation intentions has also revealed that forming implementation intentions is not accompanied by rigidity, or by rebound effects, which points to the importance of this self-regulatory strategy. The limitations of this strategy, as well as future interventions are discussed.