Harnessing placebo effects to regulate emotions

Successful emotion regulation is essential for promoting psychological and physical health (DeSteno et al., 2013; Sheppes et al., 2015). However, people often experience difficulties regulating their emotions. Even with optimal self-regulation capacity, people have problems managing their feelings when fatigued or stressed (Grillon et al., 2015; Raio et al., 2013). Therefore, it is essential to find ways to make self-regulation less difficult. Placebo effects, which are brain-body responses to an inert treatment and the psychosocial context in which it is delivered (Ashar et al., 2017), offer an avenue to address these issues since they may regulate emotions automatically (Braunstein et al., 2017). In this review, we focus on placebo effects that use a placebo object or procedure to regulate emotions. This chapter has four goals. First, we discuss placebo effects and their mechanisms. Second, we review evidence of placebos regulating emotions. Third, we discuss the ethical dilemma in using placebos to regulate emotions and highlight work on placebos without deception. Lastly, we discuss basic science and translational application questions and suggest directions for future research.