The neuroscience of placebo effects
A large proportion of the benefit that a person gets from taking a real drug or receiving a treatment to alleviate pain is due to an individual’s mindset, not to the drug itself. Understanding the neural mechanisms driving this placebo effect has been a longstanding question. A meta-analysis published in
Nature Communications finds that placebo treatments to reduce pain, known as placebo analgesia, reduce pain-related activity in multiple areas of the brain.
Previous studies of this kind have relied on small-scale studies, so until now, researchers did not know if the neural mechanisms underlying placebo effects observed to date would hold up across larger samples. This study represents the first large-scale mega-analysis, which looks at individual participants’ whole brain images. It enabled researchers to look at parts of the brain that they did not have sufficient resolution to look at in the past. The analysis was comprised of 20 neur
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The stress of the pandemic could be prompting some people to turn to the bottle more often, researchers warn. This is particularly problematic for people who live in areas where there are stay-at-home orders, especially for young adults.
When it comes to the success of mindfulness-based meditation programs, the instructor and the group are often more significant than the type or amount of meditation practiced.
For people who feel stressed, anxious, or depressed, meditation can offer a way to find some emotional peace. Structured mindfulness-based meditation programs, in which a trained instructor leads regular group sessions featuring meditation, have proved effective in improving psychological well-being.
But the precise factors for
why these programs can help are less clear. The new study teases apart the different therapeutic factors to find out.
Mindfulness-based meditation programs often operate with the assumption that meditation is the active ingredient, but less attention is paid to social factors inherent in these programs, like the group and the instructor, says lead author Willoughby Britton, an assistant professor of psychiatry and human behavior at Brown University.
Social, Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience Lab, found that hazardous alcohol use and likely dependence increased every month for those under lockdowns compared to those not under restrictions. Being under lockdown during a worldwide pandemic has been hard on everyone, and many people are relying on greater quantities of alcohol to ease their distress, Killgore said. We found that younger people were the most susceptible to increased alcohol use during the pandemic, which could set them on the dangerous path toward long-term alcohol dependence.
The paper,
Between April and September 2020, Killgore and UArizona co-authors
Sara Cloonan,
Daniel Lucas and
Natalie Dailey surveyed 5,931 adults from all 50 states and the District of Columbia. Each month, roughly 1,000 participants completed the Alcohol Use Disorders Identification Test, a 10-item questionnaire known as AUDIT, that is used to detect hazardous drinking in adults.