Education and demonstration – Psychology
Patent
1994-08-31
1998-11-10
Apley, Richard J.
Education and demonstration
Psychology
434238, 131270, G09B 1900
Patent
active
058334661
DESCRIPTION:
BRIEF SUMMARY
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
This invention relates to a device and method to assist a person in changing their acquired behavioural responses to stimuli. The acquired behavioural responses which a person might wish to change could be associated with use of tobacco products, alcohol, drugs or over-eating, or in the presence of stress or phobias.
In the past, many behavioural modification systems which were intended to assist a person to stop performing a particular behaviour have simply offered different ways of eliminating the ability of a person to perform that type of behaviour. Other behavioural modification systems simply counted the number of times a person has performed a particular acquired behavioural response in order to encourage the person to decrease the number over time. However, by simply denying people the ability to behave in a particular way, or counting the number of times people behave in a particular way in order to encourage them to stop behaving in that way, causes people to experience feelings of deprivation and void which form what is sometimes referred to as the abstinence syndrome.
Even if physical cravings have subsided, or have been satisfied in another way, familiar events in people's daily lives trigger psychological and habitual cues which create urges to perform the acquired behavioural response. When faced with these urges, people tend to apply "raw" willpower to deny or resist the urges. Indeed, all of the prior art devices rely exclusively on the user's willpower to overcome the "urges". This often causes people to feel a sense of void and to negotiate with themselves as to whether or not they should perform the acquired behavioural response. Negotiating with themselves leads the users of the prior art devices to focus on the one behavioural response which they should not perform. This leads to cognitive distortion--short sighted and twisted reasoning--and to the rationalization that "I'll have just one more".
In this way, people tend to find it much more difficult to stop performing a particular acquired behaviour response whether that behaviour is using tobacco products, drinking alcohol, over-eating or other behaviours. This difficulty leads to a higher incidence of failure.
SUMMARY OF THE INVENTION
Accordingly, it is an object of this invention to at least partially overcome the disadvantages of the prior art. Also, it is an object of this invention to provide an alternative type of behavioural modification device and method which does not require people or users to exert "raw" willpower to overcome urges to perform acquired behavioural responses. It is an object of this invention to provide a device which assists the user to substitute alternative responses for acquired behavioural responses when the user experiences an urge to perform an acquired behavioural response.
Accordingly, in one of its broad aspects, this invention resides in providing a user-interactive device for promoting alternative responses to acquired behavioural responses comprising: user, including a first signal representing an occurrence of an urge of the user to perform an acquired behavioural response; representing alternative responses to the acquired behavioural response; the first signal, from the input means; and display the set of symbols after receiving the first signal.
Further aspects of the invention reside in providing a method for promoting alternative responses to acquired behavioural responses by use of a user-interactive device which a user interacts with, said method comprising: perform an acquired behavioural response; alternative responses to the acquired behavioural response; the acquired behavioural response or to perform one of the alternative responses; behavioural response or whether the user selected to perform one of the alternative responses; and one of the alternative responses, and displaying to the user a negative symbol if the user selected to perform the acquired behavioural response.
A further aspect of the invention resides in providing a user-interactive, sm
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Apley Richard J.
Richman Glenn E.
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