Twenty-five years ago, I wrote a special article for the Journal with the same title as this one (1). Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) was only 8 years old as a DSMIII diagnosis, and research on PTSD-related psychobiological alterations was in its infancy. As for randomized controlled trials in PTSD patients, none had been published, although a few were in progress at that time. Instead, th...

For many years, placebos have been defined by their inert content and their use as controls in clinical trials and treatments in clinical practice. Recent research shows that placebo effects are genuine psychobiological events attributable to the overall therapeutic context, and that these effects can be robust in both laboratory and clinical settings. There is also evidence that placebo effect...

This paper outlines the state of affairs in psychobiological research on psychotrauma and PTSD with a focus on the role of the oxytocin system in traumatic stress. With a high prevalence of trauma and PTSD in the Netherlands, new preventive and therapeutic interventions are needed. The focus is on the role of social support and bonding in coming to grips with psychological trauma, about the oxy...

In this article we propose a psychobiological model that construes PTSD fundamentally as a disorder of affect arousal regulation. Neuroimaging studies of emotion regulation in psychologically healthy populations are initially reviewed as a framework for interpreting the results of previously published investigations of the neural correlates of PTSD reexperiencing and dissociation. We then apply...

There has been an exponential growth in stress research in recent years in relation to health and employment. The formidable methodological problems confronting both epidemiological and psychobiological studies in this area have been amply demonstrated to oncologists in the difficulty of adequately testing hypotheses about the role of stress in carcinogenesis and disease progression. Some of th...

A driving force in an eating disorder like anorexia nervosa has been a distorted body image. The psychobiological dynamics of eating disorders have demonstrated significant hypnotic phenomena such as forms of dissociation, hallucination, time distortion and catalepsy, and therefore, pose hypnosis as a good fit for particular parts of treatment. Presented here are four hypnotic approaches design...