Developing a national undergraduate standardized curriculum for future healthcare professionals on "Making Every Contact Count" for chronic disease prevention in the Republic of Ireland.

This report describes the development of the first national undergraduate interprofessional standardized curriculum in chronic disease prevention for healthcare professionals in the Republic of Ireland. This project brought together for the first time all higher education institutions nationwide in a novel collaboration with the national health service i.e. the Health Service Executive (HSE), to develop a standardized national curriculum for undergraduate health care professions. The curriculum sits within the framework of Making Every Contact Count, the goal of which is to re-orientate health services to embed the ethos of prevention through lifestyle behavior change as part of the routine care of health professionals. The core focus of Making Every Contact Count is chronic disease prevention, targeting four main lifestyle risk factors for chronic disease; tobacco use, alcohol consumption, physical inactivity and unhealthy eating. Making Every Contact Count is a key component of Healthy Ireland, the Irish national framework for health and wellbeing. The aim of the curriculum is to prepare newly qualified health professionals with the skills needed to support patients to achieve lifestyle behavior change delivered as part of routine clinical care.

Using behavior-analytic implicit tests to assess sexual interests among normal and sex-offender populations.

BACKGROUND: The development of implicit tests for measuring biases and behavioral predispositions is a recent development within psychology. While such tests are usually researched within a social-cognitive paradigm, behavioral researchers have also begun to view these tests as potential tests of conditioning histories, including in the sexual domain. OBJECTIVE: The objective of this paper is to illustrate the utility of a behavioral approach to implicit testing and means by which implicit tests can be built to the standards of behavioral psychologists. DESIGN: Research findings illustrating the short history of implicit testing within the experimental analysis of behavior are reviewed. Relevant parallel and overlapping research findings from the field of social cognition and on the Implicit Association Test are also outlined. RESULTS: New preliminary data obtained with both normal and sex offender populations are described in order to illustrate how behavior-analytically conceived implicit tests may have potential as investigative tools for assessing histories of sexual arousal conditioning and derived stimulus associations. CONCLUSION: It is concluded that popular implicit tests are likely sensitive to conditioned and derived stimulus associations in the history of the test-taker rather than 'unconscious cognitions', per se.