Biography
Stephen Sutton is Emeritus Professor of Behavioural Science and Honorary Senior Visiting Fellow. He studied social psychology at the London School of Economics and computer science at City University. He received his PhD from the University of London in 1981 for research on the effects of fear appeals. Before moving to Cambridge in 2001, he held posts at the Institute of Psychiatry (King’s College London) and University College London. His research programme at Cambridge focused on the development and evaluation of behaviour change interventions for smoking cessation, physical activity, diet and medication adherence, using both face-to-face and digital approaches. Among other organisations, he has served on National Institute of Health and Care Excellence (NICE) and UK Medical Research Council (MRC) committees and an All-Party Parliamentary Inquiry and has advised the World Health Organisation (WHO) and the US National Cancer Institute. He has held Visiting Professorships at several universities in Europe and Australia. His main current research activity involves analysing and writing up data collected as part of a £2.2 million NIHR Programme Grant on Medication Adherence on which he was the Principal Investigator.
Research
Behaviour change; digital interventions; measurement reactivity
Publications
Selected recent publications
Akhter K, Sutton S, Mirzaei V et al. (2022). A systematic review and meta-analysis of face-to-face medication adherence interventions for patients with long term health conditions. Annals of Behavioral Medicine;56:1218-30.
König LM, Allmeta A, Christlein N et al. (2022). A systematic review and meta-analysis of studies of reactivity to digital in-the-moment measurement of health behaviour. Health Psychology Review;16:551-75.
König LM, Van Emmenis M, Nurmi J et al. (2022). Characteristics of smartphone-based dietary assessment tools: a systematic review. Health Psychology Review;16:526-50.
Naughton F, Hope A, Siegele-Brown C et al. (2023). An automated, online feasibility randomized controlled trial of a just-in-time adaptive intervention for smoking cessation (Quit Sense). Nicotine & Tobacco Research;25:1319-29.
Nurmi J, Knittle K, Naughton F et al. (2023). Biofeedback and digitalized motivational interviewing to increase daily physical activity: Series of factorial N-of-1 Randomized Controlled Trials piloting the Precious app. JMIR Formative Research;7:e34232.
Naughton F, Hope A, Siegele-Brown C et al. (2024). A smoking cessation smartphone app that delivers real-time 'context aware' behavioural support: the Quit Sense feasibility RCT. Public Health Research;12:1-99.
Brown K, Cheng C, Hagger MS et al. (2025). The Sage Handbook of Health Psychology (2nd ed.). Sage Publications.
