Expectations have a lot of power over people, as evidenced by the placebo effect, in which patients are given pills that have no active ingredient, but they don’t know that. Firmly believing that they are taking an effective drug, they actually get better because of their expectations.
“The placebo effect often works quite well when treating pain and depression,” said Katharina Schwarz, PhD, from the Institute of Psychology at the Julius-Maximilians-Universität Würzburg (JMU) in Bavaria, Germany. The mere expectation of getting a drug can alleviate symptoms and make you feel better: “And those are not just the patient’s subjective sensations; it can actually be measured physiologically.”
Men who participated in the experiment to test this theory were administered different heat stimuli through a band on their forearm. They were asked to rate the pain they felt on a scale from “no pain” to “unbearable.”
The next day, a leaflet casually informed the men that they were more or less sensitive to pain than women. One study group was told that men can endure pain particularly well given their ancient role as hunters. The other group read that women had a higher pain threshold because they can endure the pain of giving birth.
The experiment was then repeated. The participants who were told that men were less sensitive rated the pain as being much less intense than on the previous day. Those men, however, who had read that women have a higher pain tolerance now considered themselves more sensitive to pain than before.
This article was adapted from information provided by the Universität Würzburg.
