Therapy of Armpareses after Stroke by the use of Implementation Intentions

Due to learned nonuse (Uswatte & Taub, 2005) of the restricted arm stroke patients tend to use the non-restricted arm even after a sufficient remission of the operability. The following 2 studies test whether Implementation Intentions (II: „IF-THEN“-plans) represent an effective instrument for therapy of learned nonuse. With perception of a stimulus specified in the II a behavior specified in the II is activated automatically. IIs help to prevent undesirable behavior tendencies by means of the automatic activation of an alternative behavior specified in the IIs (Gollwitzer et al., 2005). In both studies subjects…