Positive Affect, Future Thinking, and Planning: Testing Brief Intervention Components to Optimize a Novel Intervention to Promote Physical Activity - Project Summary
Insufficient levels of regular physical activity (< 150 minutes/week of moderate-to-vigorous physical activity
[MVPA]) are associated with various health risks, including increased risk of breast, colon, and endometrial
cancers. Nearly 50% of adults in the US report insufficient levels of regular physical activity (PA), and 26.6%
report no regular PA at all. Most current PA interventions are resource intensive (i.e., cost to implement, partici-
pant time and burden) or “black boxes” where the active intervention components are unclear, creating critical
barriers to scalability and dissemination and limiting their impact on population health and cancer prevention.
Novel intervention strategies to increase regular PA need to be both effective and scalable. Delivering PA inter-
ventions via technology-based platforms can address scalability and dissemination barriers by minimizing cost
and resource demands; however, current technology-based PA interventions also have the same “black box”
problem as other interventions. Three brief intervention techniques are promising candidate components to
consider in developing and optimizing a novel PA intervention to address existing barriers to scalability and
dissemination: positive affective imagery (PAI), episodic future thinking (EFT), and action planning (AP). Opti-
mal component dosage is also important for optimizing an intervention. Guided by the Multiphase Optimization
Strategy (MOST) framework, we will develop audio-recorded PAI, EFT, and AP components and enroll insuffi-
ciently active (i.e., < 150 minutes/week of MVPA) adults (N=192) in a 6-week factorial intervention to test differ-
ent component combinations, different doses, and their putative mechanisms to optimize a novel, scalable in-
tervention to promote PA. In Aim 1, we will identify the optimal combination of components for meeting weekly
PA minute guidelines by testing the independent and interactive effects of the components on weekly PA
minutes during the 6-week intervention. In Aim 2, we will determine the mechanisms of each intervention com-
ponent by testing the extent to which (a) each component changes its putative mechanism, and (b) within-per-
son changes in each mechanism are associated with weekly PA minutes. The research will result in an opti-
mized, audio-recorded PA intervention that is effective and scalable and will position our interdisciplinary team
to conduct a future randomized controlled trial (RCT) focused on refinement and evaluation. These outcomes
will accelerate progress toward developing an intervention to promote PA that has potential for immediate and
broad impact on population health and cancer prevention.
