The challenges faced by early-to-mid-career researchers (EMCRs) in academia include high workloads, financial stress, major life transitions and career uncertainty. Systemic changes are necessary, but take time and might not fully address immediate needs. We provide practical recommendations for those overseeing EMCRs that focus on strategies to offer immediate support and guidance.

LGBTQI+ health remains underrepresented in health psychology, despite ongoing health inequalities shaped by social, structural, and political factors. To explore how the field can better address these issues, we hosted a solution-oriented roundtable at the 2024 EHPS conference. Drawing on discussions with participants, we present actionable recommendations to support more inclusive research practices. These include creating inclusive health psychology conference practices, fostering leadership and mentorship, and incorporating community engagement. The aim is to offer practical guidance for researchers and institutions committed to embedding LGBTQI+ perspectives more meaningfully within health psychology.

Background: Digital health interventions have the potential to improve health at a large scale globally by improving access to healthcare services and health-related information, but they tend to benefit more affluent and privileged groups more than those less privileged.

Methods: In this narrative review, we describe how this ‘digital health divide’ can manifest across three different levels reflecting inequalities in access, skills and benefits or outcomes (i.e. the first, second, and tertiary digital divide). We also discuss four key causes of this digital divide: (i)) digital health literacy as a fundamental determinant; (ii) other personal, social, community, and societal level determinants; (iii) how technology and intervention development contribute to; and (iv) how current research practice exacerbates the digital health divide by developing a biased evidence base. Finally, we formulate implications for research, policy, and practice.

Results: Specific recommendations for research include to keep digital health interventions and measurement instruments up to date with fastpaced technological changes, and to involve diverse populations in digital intervention development and evaluation research. For policy and practice, examples of recommendations are to insist on inclusive and accessible design of health technology and to ensure support for digital health intervention enactment prioritises those most vulnerable to the digital divide.

Conclusion: We conclude by highlighting the importance of addressing the digital health divide to ensure that as digital technologies’ inevitable presence grows, it does not leave those who could benefit most from innovative health technology behind.

Usability testing is a critical component of intervention development but is often perceived as time-consuming. To address this challenge, efficient and time-saving methods are essential. In the Opening Up project, we developed a decision aid to support individuals in deciding whether to discuss their mental health issues in an academic setting. After the initial development phase, we applied rapid analysis to process usability testing findings and reduce the time needed to identify and address usability issues. This approach provided quick insights into usability problems and strengths while maintaining the quality of findings. In this article, we describe the rapid analysis method, provide a quick guide for applying it in intervention development, and reflect on its utility.

People who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, questioning, and people who hold other marginalised sexual or gender identities (LGBTQI+) often experience notable health disparities. These disparities arise due to a complex interplay between social, cultural, structural, and political factors. Yet, within the European Health Psychology Society (EHPS), queer-related topics, especially those beyond the scope of gay men and men who have sex with men, have received relatively little attention. Therefore a roundtable focused on this topic was organised during the 2023 EHPS conference to (1) briefly present various projects as examples of how health psychology has and can make a positive contribution to LGBTQI+ health, (2) map out why LGBTQI+ issues receive relatively less attention within health psychology and what other areas can learn from decades of work focusing on LGBTQI+ health, and (3) generate new broad research goals to give new impetus to LGBTQI+ focused research within health psychology. The discussion focused on four broad themes: (1) assessment and measurement of LGBTQI+-related characteristics and data analysis, (2) labelling and the potential for ‘othering’, (3) balancing idealism, activism, and scientific discourse, and (4) balancing individual and environmental foci and the role of interdisciplinary teams. While the roundtable sparked an in-depth discussions of LGBTQI+ topics within health psychology, there remains a critical need for a more comprehensive exploration of this topic.

(Pre)registrations may be useful to make psychological research both more diverse and more inclusive. However, to our knowledge there was no (pre)registration form available until now that focused on diversity and inclusivity, so we took the opportunity to develop one during a set of pre-conference workshops at the European Health Psychology Society (EHPS) conference held in 2022 in Bratislava (Slovakia). This article describes the development and introduces the ‘Inclusivity & Diversity Add-On for Preregistration Forms.’

Introduction: As research highlights how climate change impacts individual and planetary health, people might consider reducing their ecological footprint by acting pro-environmentally. However, their choice might depend on how far along they are in the process of deciding to act pro-environmentally (i.e., different stages of decision making) and on their experienced difficulty in deciding in favour of the environment and which behaviour to conduct (i.e., decisional conflict).

Methods: To explore in which stage participants find themselves (i.e., not yet thinking about choices, showing interest in doing so, actively considering options, approaching a decision, having already decided but remaining open to reconsideration, or being firmly committed to a decision with little chance of change) and whether their respective stages are correlated with their experienced decisional conflict, an online, cross-sectional questionnaire was distributed among a convenience sample of 418 English-, Dutch-, and Italian-speaking adults to measure participants’ demographics, stages, and extent to which they experience decisional conflict.

Results: Based on regression analyses, we observed that participants who were further along in the stages experienced less decisional conflict.

Conclusion: Therefore, we suggest that interventions (e.g., decision aids) take stages into account to better meet users’ needs and assist people in making environmental decisions.

People make numerous health-related choices each day: For example, deciding to brush one’s teeth or to eat well and healthy – or not to do these activities. To support complex decisions and subsequent behaviour change, both Behaviour Change Interventions (BCIs) and Patient Decision Aids (PtDAs) have been developed and evolved independently to support people in health-related decision making. In this paper, we critically review BCIs and PtDAs, examine their similarities and differences, and identify potential for integration of expertise to increase the benefits for people engaging with healthcare and health behaviours.