Trial reportThe Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience2017
Frontal-Brainstem Pathways Mediating Placebo Effects on Social Rejection.
Trial report in The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 25 papers, 1 of them a synthesis 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
25 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 59 citations in OpenAlex.
- Social pain: A systematic review on interventions.F1000Research · 2025Pooled it
- The pill you don't have to take that is still effective: neural correlates of imaginary placebo intake for regulating disgust.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2024Trial
- Effects of an open-label placebo intervention on reactions to social exclusion in healthy adults: a randomized controlled trial.Scientific reports · 2023Trial
- A randomized trial that compared brain activity, efficacy and plausibility of open-label placebo treatment and cognitive repappraisal for reducing emotional distress.Scientific reports · 2023Trial
- μ Opioid Antagonist Naltrexone Partially Abolishes the Antidepressant Placebo Effect and Reduces Orbitofrontal Cortex Encoding of Reinforcement.Biological psychiatry. Cognitive neuroscience and neuroimaging · 2021Trial
- Beyond Sharing Unpleasant Affect-Evidence for Pain-Specific Opioidergic Modulation of Empathy for Pain.Cerebral cortex (New York, N.Y. : 1991) · 2021Trial
- Placebos without deception reduce self-report and neural measures of emotional distress.Nature communications · 2020Trial
- Effects and Components of Placebos with a Psychological Treatment Rationale - Three Randomized-Controlled Studies.Scientific reports · 2019Trial
- Placebo in Functional Neurological Disorders: Promise and Controversy.Healthcare (Basel, Switzerland) · 2025Review
- Neural systems for processing social relationship information along two principal dimensions.Communications biology · 2025Article
- Different prefrontal cortex activity patterns in bipolar and unipolar depression during verbal fluency tasks based on functional near infrared spectroscopy study.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Risk factors associated with nocebo effects: A review of reviews.Brain, behavior, & immunity - health · 2024Review
- Emotion regulation of social pain: double dissociation of lateral prefrontal cortices supporting reappraisal and distraction.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2023Article
- Oxytocin and the social facilitation of placebo effects.Molecular psychiatry · 2022Review
- Changes in neural processing and evaluation of negative facial expressions after administration of an open-label placebo.Scientific reports · 2022Article
- A social affective neuroscience lens on placebo analgesia.Trends in cognitive sciences · 2021Review
- The VLPFC versus the DLPFC in Downregulating Social Pain Using Reappraisal and Distraction Strategies.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2021Article
- Your presence soothes me: a neural process model of aversive emotion regulation via social buffering.Social cognitive and affective neuroscience · 2020Article
- The right VLPFC and downregulation of social pain: A TMS study.Human brain mapping · 2020Article
- Effect of Expectation on Pain Processing: A Psychophysics and Functional MRI Analysis.Frontiers in neuroscience · 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
5 authors at 3 institutions in 5 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Placebo treatments can strongly affect clinical outcomes, but research on how they shape other life experiences and emotional well-being is in its infancy. We used fMRI in humans to examine placebo effects on a particularly impactful life experience, social pain elicited by a recent romantic rejection. We compared these effects with placebo effects on physical (heat) pain, which are thought to depend on pathways connecting prefrontal cortex and periaqueductal gray (PAG). Placebo treatment, compared with control, reduced both social and physical pain, and increased activity in the dorsolateral prefrontal cortex (dlPFC) in both modalities. Placebo further altered the relationship between affect and both dlPFC and PAG activity during social pain, and effects on behavior were mediated by a pathway connecting dlPFC to the PAG, building on recent work implicating opioidergic PAG activity in the regulation of social pain. These findings suggest that placebo treatments reduce emotional distress by altering affective representations in frontal-brainstem systems.
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.