For years, many psychologists have held strongly to the belief that the key to addressing negative health habits is to change behavior. This, more than values and attitudes, is the part of personality that is easiest to change. Ingestive habits such as smoking, drinking and various eating behaviors are the most common health concerns targeted for behavioral changes. Process‐addiction behaviors (workaholism, shopaholism, and the like) fall into this category as well. Mental imagery combined with power of suggestion was taken up as the premise of behavioral medicine to help people change negative health behaviors into positive ones. Although this technique alone will not produce changes, when used alongside other behavior modification tactics and coping strategies, behavioral changes have proved effective for some people. What mental imagery does is reinforce a new desired behavior. Repeated use of images reinforces the desired behavior more strongly over time.

Emotion socialization — learning from other people about emotions and how to deal with them — starts early in life and plays a foundational role for emotion regulation development. Although extra‐familial influences, such as peers or media, gain in importance during adolescence, parents remain the primary socialization agents. For example, their own responses to emotional situations serve as a role model for emotion regulation, increasing the likelihood that their children will show similar reactions in comparable situations. Parental practices at times when their children are faced with emotional challenges also impact emotion regulation development. Whereas direct soothing and directive guidance of what to do are beneficial for younger children, they may intrude on adolescents' autonomy striving. In consequence, adolescents might pull away from, rather than turn toward, their parents in times of emotional crisis, unless parental practices are adjusted. More suitable in adolescence is indirect support of autonomous emotion regulation, such as through interest in, as well as awareness and nonjudgmental acceptance of, adolescents' emotional experiences, and being available when the adolescent wants to talk.

Beethoven's drive to create something novel is a reflection of his state of curiosity. Our brains experience a sense of reward when we create something new in the process of exploring something uncertain, such as a musical phrase that we've never played or heard before. When our curiosity leads to something novel, the resulting reward brings us a sense of pleasure. A number of investigators have modeled how curiosity influences musical composition. In the case of Beethoven, computer modeling focused on the thirty‐two piano sonatas written after age thirteen revealed that the musical patterns found in all of Beethoven's music decreased in later sonatas, while novel patterns, including patterns that were unique to a particular sonata, increased. In other words, Beethoven's music became less predictable over time as his curiosity drove the exploration of new musical ideas. Curiosity is a powerful driver of human creativity.