ReviewNeuroscience and biobehavioral reviews2017
What's in a word? How instructions, suggestions, and social information change pain and emotion.
Review in Neuroscience and biobehavioral reviews, 2017. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 49 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
49 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it, 160 citations in OpenAlex.
- Meta-analytic evidence for distinct neural correlates of conditioned versus verbally induced placebo analgesia.Nature communications · 2026Pooled it
- Impact of Verbal Suggestions on Finger Flexor Activation and Strength in Healthy Individuals.Medical science monitor : international medical journal of experimental and clinical research · 2023Trial
- Trial
- Deceptive and open-label placebo effects in experimentally induced guilt: a randomized controlled trial in healthy subjects.Scientific reports · 2022Trial
- Effects and Components of Placebos with a Psychological Treatment Rationale - Three Randomized-Controlled Studies.Scientific reports · 2019Trial
- Frontal-Brainstem Pathways Mediating Placebo Effects on Social Rejection.The Journal of neuroscience : the official journal of the Society for Neuroscience · 2017Trial
- Semantic processing and individual suggestibility modulate motor preparation and perceived distance for looming sounds entering the peripersonal space.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Context-dependent placebo hypoalgesia through observational learning: the role of empathy in immersive and non-immersive environments.NPJ digital medicine · 2026Article
- Healing vs. hurting words: the power of language in pain perception-a narrative review.Frontiers in pain research (Lausanne, Switzerland) · 2026Review
- Advancing the Prediction and Understanding of Placebo Responses in Chronic Back Pain Using Large Language Models.European journal of pain (London, England) · 2026Article
- Music interferes with expectation-induced pain modulation: a controlled cross-over experimental study.Pain reports · 2025Article
- Neuropsychological mechanisms of observational learning in human placebo effects.Psychopharmacology · 2025Review
- Placebo treatment entails resource-dependent downregulation of negative inputs.Scientific reports · 2025Article
- Divisive negative discourse biases social experience: a live experiment at a massive public event.Humanities & social sciences communications · 2025Article
- Article
- Tell me what to expect: how instructions affect the pain response of patients with chronic myofascial pain with referral.Journal of oral & facial pain and headache · 2024Article
- Social Determinants and Consequences of Pain: Toward Multilevel, Intersectional, and Life Course Perspectives.The journal of pain · 2024Review
- The social transmission of empathy relies on observational reinforcement learning.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
- The relevance of outcome expectations in group hypnosis for stress reduction: a secondary analysis of a multicenter randomized controlled trial.Frontiers in psychology · 2024Article
- Brain mediators of biased social learning of self-perception in social anxiety disorder.Translational psychiatry · 2023Article
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 2 institutions in 2 countries.
Funding
Abstract
Instructions, suggestions, and other types of social information can have powerful effects on pain and emotion. Prominent examples include observational learning, social influence, placebo, and hypnosis. These different phenomena and their underlying brain mechanisms have been studied in partially separate literatures, which we discuss, compare, and integrate in this review. Converging findings from these literatures suggest that (1) instructions and social information affect brain systems associated with the generation of pain and emotion, and with reinforcement learning, and that (2) these changes are mediated by alterations in prefrontal systems responsible for top-down control and the generation of affective meaning. We argue that changes in expectation and appraisal, a process of assessing personal meaning and implications for wellbeing, are two potential key mediators of the effects of instructions and social information on affective experience. Finally, we propose a tentative model of how prefrontal regions, especially dorsolateral and ventromedial prefrontal cortex may regulate affective processing based on instructions and socially transmitted expectations more broadly.
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.