The influence of positive or negative expectations on clinical outcomes such as pain relief or motor performance in patients and healthy participants has been extensively investigated for years. Such research promises potential benefit for patient treatment by deliberately using expectations as means to stimulate endogenous regulation processes. Especially regarding recent interest and controve...

Although placebo pills are supposed to have no pharmacological activity, people taking placebo pills describe a variety of positive (i.e., placebo phenomenon) and negative (i.e., nocebo phenomenon) reactions. This has major clinical implications. Placebo reactions account for a substantial part of improvement when treating patients with hypertension, mental disorders, and even after surgical pr...

Introduction. The nocebo effect consists in delivering verbal suggestions of negative outcomes so that the subject expects clinical worsening. Several studies indicate that negative verbal suggestions may result in the amplification of pain. Amplification style is one of the most important dimensions in psychosomatic research. Methods. One group of pain therapy unit patients was evaluated at ba...

The present evidence illustrates that the placebo effect depends on a variety of neurochemical and neurophysiological mechanisms, which are measurable and modifiable. However, the placebo response is inexorably tied to the treatment context. All medical treatments take place in a particular context; this context includes the therapist's attitudes, psychosocial factors affecting the therapeutic ...