Department of Systems Neuroscience, University Medical Center Hamburg-Eppendorf, Hamburg, Germany.
Max Planck School of Cognition, Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences, Leipzig, Germany.
Pain. 2021 Jun 1;162(6):1781-1789. doi: 10.1097/j.pain.0000000000002166.
Efficacy of treatment is heavily dependent on experience and expectations. Moreover, humans can generalize from one experience to a perceptually similar but novel situation. We investigated whether and how this applies to pain relief, using ecologically valid tonic pain stimuli treated by surreptitiously lowering the applied temperature. Using different face cues, participants experienced better treatment from one physician than another. Participants were then tested on 6 additional face cues perceptually lying between both faces. Our data from 2 independent samples (N = 18 and N = 39) show a treatment experience effect, ie, for physically identical treatments, the initially superior physician was reported to deliver stronger pain relief. More importantly, the other faces on the perceptual continuum showed a graded effect of pain relief, indicating placebo generalization. Introducing a paradigm feasible to induce placebo pain relief, we show that the generic learning principle of generalization can explain carryover effects between learned and novel treatment situations.
治疗效果在很大程度上取决于经验和期望。此外，人类可以从一种经验推广到感知相似但新颖的情况。我们研究了这种情况是否以及如何适用于缓解疼痛，使用生态有效 的紧张性疼痛刺激，通过秘密降低施加的温度来治疗。使用不同的面部线索，参与者发现一位医生的治疗效果优于另一位医生。然后，参与者在另外 6 个感知上介于两者之间的面部线索上进行测试。我们从 2 个独立样本（N = 18 和 N = 39）的数据显示出治疗体验效应，即对于物理上相同的治疗，最初表现较好的医生被报告能提供更强的疼痛缓解。更重要的是，在感知连续体上的其他面孔显示出疼痛缓解的分级效应，表明安慰剂推广。引入一种可行的范式来诱导安慰剂缓解疼痛，我们表明，泛化的通用学习原则可以解释从学习到新的治疗情况之间的延续效应。
