Placebo induced expectations of mood enhancement generate a positivity effect in emotional processing.


Journal

Scientific reports
ISSN: 2045-2322
Titre abrégé: Sci Rep
Pays: England
ID NLM: 101563288

Informations de publication

Date de publication:
29 03 2022
Historique:
received: 24 01 2022
accepted: 21 03 2022
entrez: 30 3 2022
pubmed: 31 3 2022
medline: 6 4 2022
Statut: epublish

Résumé

A perceptual bias towards negative emotions is a consistent finding in mood disorders and a major target of therapeutic interventions. Placebo responses in antidepressant treatment are substantial, but it is unclear whether and how underlying expectancy effects can modulate response biases to emotional inputs. In a first attempt to approach this question, we investigated how placebo induced expectation can shape the perception of specific emotional stimuli in healthy individuals. In a controlled cross-over design, positive treatment expectations were induced by verbal instructions and a hidden training manipulation combined with an alleged oxytocin nasal spray before participants performed an emotion classification task on happy and fearful facial expressions with varying intensity. Analyses of response criterion and discrimination ability as derived from emotion-specific psychometric functions demonstrate that expectation specifically lowered participants' threshold for identifying happy emotions in general, while they became less sensitive to subtle differences in emotional expressions. These indications of a positivity bias were directly correlated with participants' treatment expectations as well as subjective experiences of treatment effects and went along with a significant mood enhancement. Our findings show that expectations can induce a perceptual positivity effect in healthy individuals which is probably modulated by top-down emotion regulation and which may be able to improve mood state. Clinical implications of these promising results now need to be explored in studies of expectation manipulation in patients with mood disorders.

Identifiants

pubmed: 35351936
doi: 10.1038/s41598-022-09342-2
pii: 10.1038/s41598-022-09342-2
pmc: PMC8964732
doi:

Types de publication

Journal Article

Langues

eng

Sous-ensembles de citation

IM

Pagination

5345

Informations de copyright

© 2022. The Author(s).

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Auteurs

Joshua Baker (J)

Department for Systems Neuroscience, University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany. j.baker@uke.de.

Matthias Gamer (M)

Department of Psychology, University of Würzburg, Würzburg, Germany.

Jonas Rauh (J)

Department for Systems Neuroscience, University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany.

Stefanie Brassen (S)

Department for Systems Neuroscience, University Hospital Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany.

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