Pain, emotions and the placebo effect
    
Published on Thursday August 24 2017
In a pioneering study, researchers at the University of Luxembourg used fMRI technology to show that a person’s ability to reinterpret negative events and to control feelings influences how strongly a placebo will work to reduce pain. Dr Marian van der Meulen gave us additional input.
“Brain scans showed researchers that specific regions in the brain react when a person receives a placebo and as a result experiences less pain,” explains Dr Marian van der Meulen, neuropsychologist at the University of Luxembourg. “The regions in the brain that process pain become less active, which demonstrates that the placebo effect is real. But the psychological mechanism is still very little understood, and it is unclear why some people show a much stronger placebo response than others. We suspected that the way we can regulate our emotions plays a role and set out to investigate this.”/.../
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