The Behavior-Image Model: a paradigm for integrating prevention and health promotion in brief interventions

This paper describes the Behavior-Image Model (BIM), an emerging and innovative paradigm for planning brief interventions for adolescents that fuse the prevention of harmful behaviors with the promotion of healthy habits. We discuss the components of the BIM as a new paradigm for creating multiple behavior health interventions, as well as the empirical and conceptual underpinnings of the model, and present Project Sport as an illustration of how the BIM may be applied to construct a brief multi-behavior intervention. The BIM posits that selected salient images of others and ourselves may be used to cast gain- and loss-framed messages coupling and motivating health-promoting and health-risk behaviors within single interventions. This content in turn activates prototypes and future self-images through the processes of social and self-comparison, leading to improvements in risk and protective factors and subsequent change in targeted health-promoting and health-risk behaviors. Recommendations are offered for conducting future research integrating health-risk and health-promoting behaviors in both brief and non-brief interventions for adolescents and adults.