A prominent approach in the behavioral research literature has been to apply social cognitive and motivational theories to understand how to change various health behaviors such as physical activity, alcohol reduction, and eating a healthy diet.

This approach primarily focuses on the cognitive-motivational process, which has been effective for identifying key correlates and predictors to adopting these behaviors. Though several reviews have found these theories to be limited in their effectiveness for understanding stability in behavioral maintenance. Specifically, recent longitudinal investigations have revealed that successive behavioral repetition performed under certain circumstances can help develop constructs that can evolve the motivational process and potentially develop additional advanced processes, which in turn support behavioral maintenance. Examples of such constructs include anticipated regret, planning, and habit, which stabilize overtime in motivation, post-intention, and automatic processes, respectively. The correlative effects of these constructs with behavior have been supported in meta-analyses and have been translated to augment established behavioral theories and formulate contemporary behavior change models.

This special issue calls for theory-based investigations that include evolved/developed maintenance-level processes to understand long-term behavioral maintenance. Contributions to this issue will help identify determinants and their predictive patterns towards behavioral stability within and between population groups. We welcome studies that are conducted across diverse environmental settings that range from the home environment to rehabilitation and community centers. Though given this variability, we encourage analyses that either control for socio-structural variables or include them as moderators to identify conditional hypothesized effects.

We welcome different types of manuscripts that are relevant to the topic of behavior maintenance processes, including but not limited to:

• Systematic reviews/ Meta-analyses.

• Randomized controlled trials.

• Cross-sectional and longitudinal studies.

• Qualitative studies.

• Mixed-methods studies.

• Perspectives/Opinions/Commentaries

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Frontiers in Psychology

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