The aim of these informal meetings is to provide an opportunity to hear about colleagues' research projects, questions, and methods. The dean hopes that this meeting will see the same fruitful interdisciplinary interaction as the previous ones. The presentations and discussions will be in English.

At this eighth lunch the speakers were:

Stan Maes (Health Psychology)

The Effectiveness of Self-Regulation Interventions in Health and Illness

Self-regulation can be defined as a goal-guidance process, that requires the self-reflective implementation of various change and maintenance mechanisms that are aimed at task- and time-specific outcomes. The most frequently examined change and maintenance mechanisms (or functions) include goal selection/representation, goal -level setting, goal monitoring, planning, progress evaluation, problem solving, and emotion- and action modulation.

Self-regulation is important to the area of physical health and illness, since the traditional medical service model, in which health experts administer complex treatments and instruct patients in how to engage in follow-up self-care, can be characterized as both unrealistic and cost-ineffective.

The shift from a passive relationship of the individual with the health care system toward a more independent, self-determining position has been a gradual one and is also reflected in the development of terminology over the last few decades. Descriptions of what the patient must do have evolved from ‘compliance with medical regimens’, reflecting obedience to medical advice, to ‘adherence’, which suggests adoption of medical advice, to ‘self-management’, which denotes the responsibility of the individual for the control of his or her disease, to ‘self-regulation’.

While self-regulation in health and illness is the common denominator of all research of the Leiden Clinical, Health and Medical Psychology group, I will concentrate in the ‘food for thought’ presentation on the development and the effectiveness of theory based self-regulation (S-R) interventions in patients suffering from chronic medical conditions. Over the last few years several S-R-interventions were developed and evaluated at Leiden by our group with varying success, such as a weight reduction program for diabetes type 2 patients, a program for maintenance of life-style changes in cardiac rehabilitation patients and a program for the enhancement of physical exercise in rheumatoid arthritis patients.