ABSTRACT
This chapter reviews data showing this in a number of research domains. Independently of author work in this area, Reiss and McNally developed an expectancy-based model for understanding normal and pathological fear. Clients provided with therapeutic expectancies showed substantially greater improvement and improved more rapidly than those who were led to believe that in vivo exposure was for the purpose of assessment. In 1998, Guy Sapirstein and author published a meta-analysis aimed at assessing the placebo effect in the treatment of depression. The problem that Sapirstein and author had was that people were unable to find any depression trials that included both placebo pills and no-treatment controls. More recently, author colleagues and author have replicated this finding on a substantially more extensive data base. The powerful effect of placebos in some clinical conditions makes it imperative to understand how it is produced. Instead, it was produced via the self-confirming attribute of response expectancies.
