Conditioning induced placebo-like and nocebo-like effects of thermal discomfort in adults but not in youth
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Introduction: Conditioning can be used to modulate the perception of pain, in the form of placebo and nocebo effects. Previous studies show inconsistent results as to whether adolescents show similar, weaker, or non-significant conditioned placebo and nocebo effects compared to effects found in adults. There are suggestions that such differences (if any) may dependent on the cues used in the thermal conditioning paradigms. Therefore, in this current study, we utilized novel, neutral 3D-shaped visual cues to implicitly induce conditioned placebo-like and nocebo-like effects in adolescents and adults. Methods: During the conditioning paradigm, distinct cues (Fribbles) were paired with low and high temperatures in 24 adults and 20 adolescents (mean age = 25.5 years). In the testing phase, these conditioned cues as well as a neutral (unconditioned) cue were presented with moderate temperatures. Results: Thermal discomfort of moderate temperatures was lower when presented with the conditioned low heat cue (placebo-like effect) and higher when thermal stimuli were presented with the high heat cue (nocebo-like effect) compared to the neutral cue. The effects were driven by adults, as neither the placebo-like nor the nocebo-like effect was significant in adolescents. The difference between adolescents and adults was not explained by differences in temperature or discomfort levels, as adults and adolescents had comparable calibrated temperatures and levels of discomfort during heat stimuli. Conclusion: Our findings suggest that thermal perception in adolescents is less influenced by conditioning to an engaging novel visual cue, compared to adults. Our work may have implications for better understanding the scope and limitations of conditioning as a key mechanism of placebo and nocebo effects in youth.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.008 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".