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Deconstructing the placebo response: Why does it work in treating depression?

UCLA study suggests patients’ responses are closely tied to their expectations

In the past three decades, the power of placebos has gone through the roof in treating major depressive disorder. In clinical trials for treating depression over that period of time, researchers have reported significant increases in patient’s response rates to placebos — the simple sugar pills given to patients who think that it may be actual medication. (more…)

‘Buyer Beware: Advertising May Seduce Your Brain’

By Guest PostSeptember 21, 2011Science, Technologyadvertisers, advertising, amygdala, andrew f leuchter, behavior, brain, cigarette products, cognitive responses to marketing stimuli, david schairer, decision making andemotional processing, eeg, electroencephalography, flat screen tv, george washington university, hippocampus, ian cook, levels of brain activity, logical persuasion, lp, magazines and newspapers, non rational influence, notion of neuromarketing, orbitofrontal and anterior cingulate regions, pretty woman, real world advertisements, sarah k pajot, washing machine

Are you wooed by advertising? Of course you are. After all, it’s one thing to go out and buy a new washing machine after the old one exploded, quite another to impulse-buy that 246-inch flat screen TV that just maybe, in hindsight, you didn’t really need.

Advertisers come at you in two ways. There is the just-the-facts type of ad, called “logical persuasion,” or LP (“This car gets 42 miles to the gallon”), and then there is the ad that circumvents conscious awareness, called “non-rational influence,” or NI (a pretty woman, say, draped over a car). (more…)

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Deconstructing the placebo response: Why does it work in treating depression?

‘Buyer Beware: Advertising May Seduce Your Brain’