A transferable anxiolytic placebo effect from noise to negative effect

Abstract

Background: The placebo effect in relieving negative emotion arousal is poorly understood.

Aims: We examined whether placebo expectation established with noise stimuli could have a transferable anxiolytic effect on negative emotion arousal.

Methods: In Experiment 1, noise intensity was surreptitiously lowered during placebo condition in the preconditioning phase to reinforce placebo expectation, and the noise-relieving placebo effect was assessed in the testing phase. In Experiment 2, the same manipulation as in Experiment 1 was administered in the preconditioning phase, but the anxiolytic placebo effect was assessed in the testing phase using negative pictures.

Results: Intensity and annoyance by the noise in Experiment 1 were significantly reduced, and unpleasantness in Experiment 2 was also significantly reduced in the placebo condition.

Conclusion: Direct noise-relieving placebo effects and transferred anxiolytic placebo effects were found. The present study provides evidence that the placebo effect can be transferred from noise to emotion.

• Conditioning
• expectation
• negative emotion
• noise
• transferable placebo effect

Declaration of interest

This research was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (31100746, 31371131 and 31371308), the National Key Technology Research and Development Program of China (2013BAI08B02), and the Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences. The authors declare no conflicts of interest.