prof.dr. V.L. Barbosa Araujo Soares Sniehotta (Vera)

My research aims at developing and evaluating interventions to change health-related behaviours and symptoms. This involves conducting formative research, understanding determinants of behaviour and symptoms, the development of innovative blended interventions (integrating face-to-face contacts and technology), their evaluation and process evaluation. This research is theoretically grounded, applied, interdisciplinary and multi-methodological. My motivation is to achieve real world impact. To achieve this, I conduct formative research to address gaps in our understanding of why people behave the way they do and how behaviour can be changed. This involves innovative theoretically inspired psychological discovery science.

I have considerable experience in developing and evaluating interventions to improve health. My work includes face-to-face interventions with whole-school system interventions (Hankonen et al., 2016; BMC Public Health), interventions for patients with very rare conditions (Walburn et al., 2019; BMJ Open) and e- and mhealth interventions (Sniehotta et al., 2019; PLoS Medicine) focusing on a range of outcomes and target populations from changing delivery behaviours of health care professionals to behaviour change in patients and members of the public. An invited paper summarising my methodological approach to intervention development has been published (Araujo-Soares et al., 2019, European Psychologist).

I am interested in the role of psychological interventions in improving population health and health equity and I have recently formulated a vision on how individual and contextual driven interventions can be used to optimise population health (Araujo-Soares & Sniehotta, 2017, Nature Human Behaviour, Sniehotta et al., 2017; Lancet Public Health).

The realisation that population health is highly linked to planetary health shapes my current desire to use behavioural and health psychological knowledge on human behaviours, and how to change these, to target the overlapping and common agendas of population and planetary health.