ArticleFrontiers in psychology2017
Placebo and Nocebo Effects: The Advantage of Measuring Expectations and Psychological Factors.
Article in Frontiers in psychology, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 84 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
84 citing papers in PubMed, 3 syntheses or guidelines pooled it, 170 citations in OpenAlex.
- Trait responsiveness to verbal suggestions predicts nocebo responding: A meta-analysis.British journal of health psychology · 2025Pooled it
- Pooled it
- The Nocebo Effect: A Review of Contemporary Experimental Research.International journal of behavioral medicine · 2022Pooled it
- It Is Time to Feel Better: How Temporal Information of Placebo Analgesia Affects Our Brain.European journal of pain (London, England) · 2025Trial
- Is it personality or genes? - A secondary analysis on a randomized controlled trial investigating responsiveness to placebo analgesia.Scandinavian journal of pain · 2025Trial
- Nocebo expectations rather than placebo expectations affect topical pain relief: A randomized clinical trial.Biomedicine & pharmacotherapy = Biomedecine & pharmacotherapie · 2024Trial
- Prismatic adaptation coupled with cognitive training as novel treatment for developmental dyslexia: a randomized controlled trial.Scientific reports · 2024Trial
- Placebo and nocebo interventions impact perceived but not actual proprioceptive accuracy.PloS one · 2024Trial
- Influence of pain anticipation on brain activity and pain perception in Gulf War Veterans with chronic musculoskeletal pain.Psychophysiology · 2019Trial
- Beyond pharmacology: The mediating role of expectations in the experience of side effects in anxious patients treated with secukinumab.Brain, behavior, & immunity - health · 2026Article
- Short-Term Effect of Negative Verbal Language Versus Positive Verbal Language on Physical and Functional Capacity and Pain in People With Chronic Primary Low Back Pain.European journal of pain (London, England) · 2026Article
- Placebo and nocebo effects on pain through the lens of the predictive brain: Neurobiological mechanisms and translational implications.Experimental physiology · 2026Review
- Cholecystokinin input from the anterior cingulate cortex to the lateral periaqueductal gray mediates nocebo pain behavior in mice.Nature communications · 2026Article
- The power to adapt: How resilience and changing expectations contribute to placebo effects.The journal of pain · 2026Article
- Effects of likelihood framing on side effect expectations and nocebo side effects: Results from three experimental studies with a placebo analgesic cream.British journal of health psychology · 2026Article
- The High-Risk Model of Threat Perception Modulates Learning of Placebo and Nocebo Effects and Functional Somatic Disorders.Brain sciences · 2025Review
- Conditioned Pain Modulation, Placebo and Offset Analgesia: Rates of Behavioural Expression of Inhibitory, Nonresponse and Facilitatory Pain Modulatory Effects.European journal of pain (London, England) · 2025Article
- Positive and Negative Expectations Associated with Coffee and Energy Drinks: Implications for Placebo-Nocebo Research in Sports.Nutrients · 2025Article
- Predicting the side effects of influenza vaccination.Annals of behavioral medicine : a publication of the Society of Behavioral Medicine · 2025Article
- Clinical neuroscience and neurobiology of placebo and nocebo effects.International review of neurobiology · 2025Review
24 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors at 1 institution in 2 countries.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
Several studies have explored the predictability of placebo and nocebo individual responses by investigating personality factors and expectations of pain decreases and increases. Psychological factors such as optimism, suggestibility, empathy and neuroticism have been linked to placebo effects, while pessimism, anxiety and catastrophizing have been associated to nocebo effects. We aimed to investigate the interplay between psychological factors, expectations of low and high pain and placebo hypoalgesia and nocebo hyperalgesia. We studied 46 healthy participants using a well-validated conditioning paradigm with contact heat thermal stimulations. Visual cues were presented to alert participants about the level of intensity of an upcoming thermal pain. We delivered high, medium and low levels of pain associated with red, yellow and green cues, respectively, during the conditioning phase. During the testing phase, the level of painful stimulations was surreptitiously set at the medium control level with all the three cues to measure placebo and nocebo effects. We found both robust placebo hypolagesic and nocebo hyperalgesic responses that were highly correlated with expectancy of low and high pain. Simple linear regression analyses showed that placebo responses were negatively correlated with anxiety severity and different aspects of fear of pain (e.g., medical pain, severe pain). Nocebo responses were positively correlated with anxiety sensitivity and physiological suggestibility with a trend toward catastrophizing. Step-wise regression analyses indicated that an aggregate score of motivation (value/utility and pressure/tense subscales) and suggestibility (physiological reactivity and persuadability subscales), accounted for the 51% of the variance in the placebo responsiveness. When considered together, anxiety severity, NEO openness-extraversion and depression accounted for the 49.1% of the variance of the nocebo responses. Psychological factors
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.