Papers of the Week

Placebo analgesic research demonstrates pain reduction after using a placebo analgesic. Recent studies have documented that sometimes possessing a placebo analgesic induces placebo analgesia. These prior studies used a ‘cream’ as the stimulus and proposed that the effect is driven by an expectancy of obtaining benefits from the owned analgesic. This paper examines three pivotal components of placebo analgesia: placebo form, ownership and expectancy induced by verbal suggestion. We investigate analgesic expectancy between cream versus oil form of placebo stimulus and systematically isolate the effects of ownership, verbal suggestion and their interaction, comparing with the effect of use, to decipher the dynamics of placebo analgesia.