Published in Psychopharmacology
Modern psychedelic research remains in an early phase, and the eventual introduction of psychedelics into clinical practice remains in doubt. In this piece, we discuss the role of blinding and expectancy in psychedelic trials, and place this in a broader historical and contemporary context of blinding in trials across the rest of healthcare. We sug...
Published in The American journal of clinical hypnosis
Each person forms a relationship to the dimension of time, called a "temporal orientation." How that relationship is defined and prioritized, whether consciously or non-consciously, plays a huge role in the way people go about living their lives. In psychotherapy, the quality of one's expectations plays a pivotal role in virtually every phase of tr...
Published in Progress in neurobiology
Reinforcement learning and goal-seeking behavior are thought to be mediated by midbrain dopamine neurons. However, little is known about neural substrates of curiosity and exploratory behavior, which occur in the absence of clear goal or reward. This is despite behavioral scientists having long suggested that curiosity and exploratory behaviors are...
Research suggests that self-esteem, individuals ' expectancies regarding their ability to deal with future stressors and cognitive control are related and participate in the process of stress regulation. In the current study, 286 participants (51 men and 235 women; ranging from 18 to 89 years old; mean age = 27.53, SD = 10.64) completed online ques...
Published in The Arts in Psychotherapy
Patient preferences deserve consideration as they play a role in engagement with psychosocial interventions. This study sought to understand more about preferences and expectations of the arts therapies, in order to support informed decision-making. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 17 participants in a trial of group music therapy, ar...
Published in Psychopharmacology
Cannabidiol (CBD) has been reported to attenuate stress and anxiety, but little is known about the extent to which such effects result from pharmacological versus expectancy factors. We evaluated whether CBD expectancy alone could influence stress, anxiety, and mood, and the extent to which beliefs regarding CBD effects predicted these responses. I...
Published in The American journal of clinical hypnosis
We tested the role of hypnotic suggestibility, involuntariness, pain expectation, and subjective hypnotic depth in the prediction of placebo analgesia (PA) responsiveness. We also tested the link of lower and upper alpha sub-band (i.e., 'alpha1' and 'alpha2') power changes with tonic PA responding during waking and hypnosis conditions. Following an...
Published in Progress in neuro-psychopharmacology & biological psychiatry
In neurofeedback applications, neural activity is recorded, processed in real-time and fed back to the user in order to facilitate self-regulation of the putative neural mechanisms that underlie cognition and behavior. Numerous studies suggest that neurofeedback interventions are an efficacious treatment particularly for patients with attention-def...
Published in Pain
In most experimental studies in which verbal suggestion and classical conditioning are implemented together to induce placebo effects, the former precedes the latter. In naturally occurring situations, however, the information concerning pain does not always precede but often follows the pain experience. Moreover, this information is not always con...
Published in NeuroImage
Learning to anticipate future states of the world based on statistical regularities in the environment is a key component of perception and is vital for the survival of many organisms. Such statistical learning and prediction are crucial for acquiring language and music appreciation. Importantly, learned expectations can be implicitly derived from ...
