Lecture 10 Placebo

Question 1

What is a placebo?

Answer 1

A treatment that has no known plausible benefit for the condition being treated

Question 2

What is the placebo effect?

Answer 2

The effect from something that is known to have no plausible effect. A change in a patient’s illness or symptoms due to the administration of symbolic (not true) treatment.

Question 3

What areas of health involve the placebo effect?

Answer 3

• Anti-depressants
• Arthroscopic surgery
• Acupuncture
• Pain medications

Question 4

What are the possible reasons for the placebo effect?

Answer 4

• Expectations
• Reduced anxiety
• Social learning and conditioning
• Brain changes, physiological responses, immunosuppression, endorphin release…

Question 5

How effective is the placebo effect in pain medication?

Answer 5

Placebo effect accounts for 50% of results achieved from consumption of pain meds

Question 6

What is the nocebo effect?

Answer 6

negative effects of symptoms reported by patients or study participants when receiving an inert substance or the placebo.

Question 7

What is situated cognition (grounded cognition)?

Answer 7

Thought, knowing and subsequently behaviour is influenced by our social, physical and cultural settings. It proposes that repeated historical exposure to SP&C settings influence thoughts and behaviour. And the real-time contexts can influence unconscious thoughts and behaviours accumulated from past SP&C historical exposures…

Question 8

How do cues relate to Embodied or Situated cognitions, and what are they used for?

Answer 8

Unconcious cues in the environment can influence people to display particular behaviour. Used for influencing people to think along a certain line (e.g. advertising)

Question 9

What are types of Situated or Embodied cues?

Answer 9

• Facial/physical cues
• Cues from other people
• Ambient (smell) cues

Question 10

What are pheromones?

Answer 10

Chemical produced and released by a living organism that affects the behaviour of other members of its species

Question 11

What is a stereotype?

Answer 11

Beliefs about a particular target or identity that is then generalised to the whole target group. They function as shortcuts for quickly making sense of our world (quick judgements)

Question 12

What are the two forms of racism?

Answer 12

• Old fashioned racism (old racism)

- Symbolic racism (new racism)

Question 13

What is Old fashioned racism?

Answer 13

• believe in the biological inferiority of Black People
• Stereotypes of low intelligence, laziness…etc
• Open hatred and feelings of superiority are shown

Question 14

What is symbolic racism?

Answer 14

-involves rejection of old fashion racism (not blatant or obvious) but still perceive black people as morally inferior. Have opposition to providing resources to black people

Question 15

Why do symbolic racists consider themselves to be not racist?

Answer 15

• Consider only old-fashion racism to be racist
• Subtle negative feelings towards blacks are disguised in order to prevent dissonance associated with conflict between their prejudice and egalitarian values

Question 16

What are the 5 factors underlying symbolic racism?

Answer 16

• Mild to moderate anti-target attitudes
• Belief in traditional values
• Low outcome-based egalitarianism (all people are equal)
• Group self-interest
• Little personal knowledge of the target group

Question 17

How do we measure symbolic racism?

Answer 17

Use symbolic racism scale where individuals indicate level of agreement or disagreement with certain statements (e.g. over the past few years, Blacks and Muslims have gotten less than they deserve)