ArticleScientific reports2015
Not seeing or feeling is still believing: conscious and non-conscious pain modulation after direct and observational learning.
Article in Scientific reports, 2015. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 33 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
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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
33 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- 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
- Effects of Hidden Conditioning and Positive Expectations on Pain Intensity Following Spinal Manipulative Therapy: A Three-Arm Randomized Controlled Trial.European journal of pain (London, England) · 2026Trial
- Investigating whether socially acquired nocebo effects can spread to other treatments.Scientific reports · 2025Trial
- Nocebo expectations rather than placebo expectations affect topical pain relief: A randomized clinical trial.Biomedicine & pharmacotherapy = Biomedecine & pharmacotherapie · 2024Trial
- Savor the flavor: A randomized double-blind study assessing taste-enhanced placebo analgesia in healthy volunteers.Clinical and translational science · 2022Trial
- The Effect of the Model's Social Status on Placebo Analgesia Induced by Social Observational Learning.Pain medicine (Malden, Mass.) · 2022Trial
- Enhancing treatment of osteoarthritis knee pain by boosting expectancy: A functional neuroimaging study.NeuroImage. Clinical · 2018Trial
- Context-dependent placebo hypoalgesia through observational learning: the role of empathy in immersive and non-immersive environments.NPJ digital medicine · 2026Article
- Does the name of a disease matter? Chinese people's public perception of the renaming of COVID-19.Journal of public health (Oxford, England) · 2025Article
- Neuropsychological mechanisms of observational learning in human placebo effects.Psychopharmacology · 2025Review
- Interpersonal physiological and psychological synchrony predict the social transmission of nocebo hyperalgesia between individuals.Communications psychology · 2024Article
- When knowledge hurts: humans are willing to receive pain for obtaining non-instrumental information.Proceedings. Biological sciences · 2023Article
- Article
- [Seeing others is believing-analgesic placebo effects through observational learning?]Schmerz (Berlin, Germany) · 2022Review
- How expectations of pain elicited by consciously and unconsciously perceived cues unfold over time.NeuroImage · 2021Article
- Mesocorticolimbic Pathways Encode Cue-Based Expectancy Effects on Pain.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2020Article
- Nocebo hyperalgesia can be induced by classical conditioning without involvement of expectancy.PloS one · 2020Article
- Article
- Hyperalgesia when observing pain-related images is a genuine bias in perception and enhances autonomic responses.Scientific reports · 2019Article
- Different brain networks mediate the effects of social and conditioned expectations on pain.Nature communications · 2019Article
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
6 authors.
Funding
Abstract
Our experience with the world is shaped not only directly through personal exposure but also indirectly through observing others and learning from their experiences. Using a conditioning paradigm, we investigated how directly and observationally learned information can affect pain perception, both consciously and non-consciously. Differences between direct and observed cues were manifest in higher pain ratings and larger skin conductance responses to directly experienced cues. However, the pain modulation effects produced by conditioning were of comparable magnitude for direct and observational learning. These results suggest that social observation can induce positive and negative pain modulation. Importantly, the fact that cues learned by observation and activated non-consciously still produced a robust conditioning effect that withstood extinction highlights the role of indirect exposure in placebo and nocebo effects.
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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.