ABSTRACT
This chapter provides the empirical studies advancing the theoretical understanding of response expectancies and their role in placebo effects in healthy populations, people began to investigate the role of response expectancies in: cancer patients' experiences of treatment-related side effects; and psychosocial interventions in cancer care. Building on previous research on placebo effects, classical conditioning, and response expectancies, our team has investigated response expectancies' role in the development and experience of anticipatory nausea (AN) in chemotherapy patients. Fail-safe analyses indicated that it would take 120 studies reporting null results to reduce the reported effect size. The chapter indicates that using hypnosis is an effective intervention for changing breast cancer patients' response expectancies and, in turn, decreasing nausea, fatigue, pain, and emotional distress during their cancer treatments.
