Trial reportPain2014
Partial reinforcement, extinction, and placebo analgesia.
Trial report in Pain, 2014. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 40 papers, 3 of them syntheses that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
40 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 94 citations in OpenAlex.
- Learning by observing: a systematic exploration of modulatory factors and the impact of observationally induced placebo and nocebo effects on treatment outcomes.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Pooled it
- Pooled it
- The Influence of Placebo Effect on Craving and Cognitive Performance in Alcohol, Caffeine, or Nicotine Consumers: A Systematic Review.Frontiers in psychiatry · 2020Pooled it
- Learning mechanisms in nocebo hyperalgesia: the role of conditioning and extinction processes.Pain · 2020Trial
- The effect of dopamine on conditioned placebo analgesia in healthy individuals: a double-blind randomized trial.Psychopharmacology · 2018Trial
- Probability differently modulating the effects of reward and punishment on visuomotor adaptation.Experimental brain research · 2017Trial
- Classical conditioning without verbal suggestions elicits placebo analgesia and nocebo hyperalgesia.PloS one · 2017Trial
- Effects of Oxytocin on Placebo and Nocebo Effects in a Pain Conditioning Paradigm: A Randomized Controlled Trial.The journal of painTrial
- A Reliable Effect of Alexithymia, but Not Autism, on Placebo Hypoalgesia.Autism : the international journal of research and practice · 2026Article
- Differential neural activity predicts the long-term stability of the effects of positive and negative expectations on pain.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Interpersonal physiological and psychological synchrony predict the social transmission of nocebo hyperalgesia between individuals.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- Can Pharmacological Conditioning as an Add-On Treatment Optimize Standard Pharmacological Treatment in Patients with Recent-Onset Rheumatoid Arthritis? A Proof-of-Principle Randomized Clinical Trial.Pharmaceuticals (Basel, Switzerland) · 2024Article
- Placebo hypoalgesia induced by operant conditioning: a comparative study on the effects of verbal, token-based, and social rewards and punishers.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- The Placebo Effect in Psychosis: Why It Matters and How to Measure It.Biological psychiatry global open science · 2023Review
- Associative learning and extinction of conditioned threat predictors across sensory modalities.Communications biology · 2021Article
- Article
- Dynamic brain-to-brain concordance and behavioral mirroring as a mechanism of the patient-clinician interaction.Science advances · 2020Article
- Article
- When Success Is Not Enough: The Symptom Base-Rate Can Influence Judgments of Effectiveness of a Successful Treatment.Frontiers in psychology · 2020Article
- Prior Therapeutic Experiences, Not Expectation Ratings, Predict Placebo Effects: An Experimental Study in Chronic Pain and Healthy Participants.Psychotherapy and psychosomatics · 2020Article
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors at 3 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Numerous studies indicate that placebo analgesia can be established via conditioning procedures. However, these studies have exclusively involved conditioning under continuous reinforcement. Thus, it is currently unknown whether placebo analgesia can be established under partial reinforcement and how durable any such effect would be. We tested this possibility using electrocutaneous pain in healthy volunteers. Sixty undergraduates received placebo treatment (activation of a sham electrode) under the guise of an analgesic trial. The participants were randomly allocated to different conditioning schedules, namely continuous reinforcement (CRF), partial reinforcement (PRF), or control (no conditioning). Conditioning was achieved by surreptitiously reducing pain intensity during training when the placebo was activated compared with when it was inactive. For the CRF group, the placebo was always followed by a surreptitious reduction in pain during training. For the PRF group, the placebo was followed by a reduction in pain stimulation on 62.5% of trials only. In the test phase, pain stimulation was equivalent across placebo and no placebo trials. Both CRF and PRF produced placebo analgesia, with the magnitude of initial analgesia being larger after CRF. However, although the placebo analgesia established under CRF extinguished during test phase, the placebo analgesia established under PRF did not. These findings indicate that PRF can induce placebo analgesia and that these effects are more resistant to extinction than those established via CRF. PRF may therefore reflect a novel way of enhancing clinical outcomes via the placebo effect.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.