Early Empowerment Strategies Boost Self-Efficacy to Improve Cardiovascular Health Behaviors
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Self-efficacy, defined as confidence in the ability to carry out behavior to achieve a desired goal, is considered to be a prerequisite for behavior change. Self-efficacy correlates with cardiovascular health although optimal timing to incorporate self-efficacy strategies is not well established. We sought to study the effect of an empowerment approach implemented in the introductory phase of a multicomponent lifestyle intervention on cardiovascular health outcomes. DESIGN: Prospective intervention cohort study. METHODS: Patients in the Integrative Cardiac Health Project Registry, a prospective lifestyle change program for the prevention of cardiovascular disease were analyzed for behavioral changes by survey, at baseline and one year, in the domains of nutrition, exercise, stress management and sleep. Self-efficacy questionnaires were administered at baseline and after the empowerment intervention, at 8 weeks. RESULTS: Of 119 consecutive registry completers, 60 comprised a high self-efficacy group (scoring at or above the median of 36 points) and 59 the low self-efficacy group (scoring below median). Self-efficacy scores increased irrespective of baseline self-efficacy but the largest gains in self-efficacy occurred in patients who ranked in the lower half for self-efficacy at baseline. This lower self-efficacy group demonstrated behavioral gains that erased differences between the high and low self-efficacy groups. CONCLUSIONS: A boost to self-efficacy early in a lifestyle intervention program produces significant improvements in behavioral outcomes. Employing empowerment in an early phase may be a critical strategy to improve self-efficacy and lower risk in individuals vulnerable to cardiovascular disease.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".