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Social Control and Health Behaviors Among Individuals Living with Parkinson’s Disease: A Pilot Study

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Abstract

Background

Positive health behaviors (e.g., exercise, healthy eating habits, good sleep hygiene, treatment adherence) are important in ensuring optimal symptom management and health outcomes among individuals living with Parkinson’s disease (PD). While multiple factors may influence engagement in health behaviors, little is known about the occurrence of social control, or relationship partners’ attempts to influence and regulate another’s behavior, and its potential role in the adoption of health behaviors among individuals with PD.

Methods

To better understand the types of social control attempts employed and begin to explore the association between social control attempts and behavioral responses (e.g., engage in the targeted health behavior, hide the behavior) to those attempts, survey data were drawn from a cross-sectional, pilot study of married/partnered Veterans diagnosed with idiopathic PD (n = 25). Participants completed self-reported measures of sociodemographics, physical and mental well-being, relationship functioning, and both the frequency of and behavioral responses to positive and negative social control attempts.

Results

Although the majority of individuals reported their partners engaged in positive social control attempts, half also reported negative attempts. Bivariate analyses revealed more frequent positive social control attempts from one’s partner were related to both positive and negative behavioral responses, and negative social control attempts were related to negative behavioral responses. However, when adjusting for covariates, positive social control attempts were related to positive behavioral responses, while negative social exchanges with one’s partner (e.g., general conflict), rather than exposure to negative social control attempts, were related to negative behavioral responses.

Conclusions

Findings lend preliminary evidence of the relationship between social control and exchanges and health behavior that may inform future, adequately powered observational and intervention studies that target interpersonal processes and health behaviors among individuals living with PD and their relationship partners.

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Ms. Eugenia Mamikonyan for her invaluable assistance with the project.

Funding

This work was supported by the Corporal Michael J. Crescenz VA Medical Center Parkinson’s Disease Research, Education, and Clinical Center (PADRECC).

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Center for Scientific Review, National Institutes of Health, 6701 Rockledge Drive, Bethesda, MD, 20892, USA

    Shahrzad Mavandadi

  2. Mental Illness Research, Education and Clinical Center, Corporal Michael J. Crescenz VA Medical Center, 3900 Woodland Avenue, Philadelphia, PA, 19104, USA

    Shahrzad Mavandadi, Steven Sayers & Daniel Weintraub

  3. Department of Psychiatry, Perelman School of Medicine, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Shahrzad Mavandadi, Steven Sayers & Daniel Weintraub

  4. Mental Health and Behavioral Sciences, VA New Jersey Healthcare System, Lyons, NJ, USA

    Alejandro Interian

  5. Department of Psychiatry, Rutgers–Robert Wood Johnson Medical School, Piscataway, NJ, USA

    Roseanne Dobkin

  6. Parkinson’s Disease Research, Education and Clinical Center, Corporal Michael J. Crescenz VA Medical Center, Philadelphia, PA, USA

    Daniel Weintraub

Authors
  1. Shahrzad Mavandadi
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  2. Alejandro Interian
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  3. Steven Sayers
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  4. Roseanne Dobkin
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  5. Daniel Weintraub
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Shahrzad Mavandadi.

Ethics declarations

Ethical Approval

All procedures performed in this study involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional research committee (i.e., Corporal Michael J. Crescenz VA Medical Center Institutional Review Board) and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

Informed Consent

Informed consent was obtained from all individual participants enrolled in the study.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare no competing interests.

Disclaimer

This work was prepared while Shahrzad Mavandadi, PhD was employed at the Corporal Michael J Crescenz VA Medical Center. The opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not reflect the view of the Veterans Health Administration, National Institutes of Health, the Department of Health and Human Services, or the United States government.

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Mavandadi, S., Interian, A., Sayers, S. et al. Social Control and Health Behaviors Among Individuals Living with Parkinson’s Disease: A Pilot Study. Int.J. Behav. Med. 31, 799–805 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12529-023-10219-5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12529-023-10219-5

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