General article on problems of expectation effect/placebo in psych trials, & some interesting links

[Esther12]

I don't think that this is really relevant to the key problems with spin and CFS research, but it could be of interest to some here.

http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2013/07/09/nice-results-but-what-did-you-expect/

Psychologists can also deliberately manipulate the expectations of their volunteers—something that doctors would struggle to do ethically. They could tell some volunteers (in both the intervention and control groups) that they’d expect to see a benefit, while telling the rest that nothing should happen. They could tell people that they’d only see benefits after a certain amount of training, and test them before and after this point.

“It is of no doubt that expectancy can play a role in training studies but every one of the methods proposed by [the team] has its minuses,” says Schubert. A mix of techniques might be best, but that would greatly increase the money and time needed for a study. Why go to such extremes when the field is still at a young point, and researchers are arguing whether the effects they’re seeing are real at all? “They’re hanging a heavy stone on a new promising research area, the potential of which is currently not yet known,” says Schubert.

They really emphasised on the role of prior expectations as a form of bias, and don't really talk about the problem of the interventions themselves leading to biased reporting... but they were generally referring to training programmes, the outcomes of which depended not upon self-report questionnaires, but on testing participants.

They did also say that they were focusing upon the problems with video game training studies not because they were especially poor, but because they were some of the best psych studies around - so maybe that's why they're over-looking some problems I think are important.

It did include some related links to things I found interesting, but a lot of it is not that important to CFS, as they could be assuming that you should use objective measures of outcome rather than self-report questionnaires:

http://openscienceframework.org/project/7EB6A/node/KSzdu/wiki/home

The pervasive problem with placebos in psychology /

Frequently Asked Questions

Without a double blind design, can a psychology study ever provide strong evidence for the causal efficacy of a treatment?

Yes. In our paper we outline a number of methods to assess expectations, choose control conditions that equate expectations, and choose outcome measures that are insensitive to expectations. If participants in the control and intervention groups expect the same degree of improvement on an outcome measure, then placebo effects are less likely. Even when the gold standard design is unattainable, researchers can use such “silver” standard designs and then check for the problems that the gold standard design eliminates.

Blog post on it:

http://blog.dansimons.com/2013/07/pop-quiz-what-can-we-learn-from.html

Paper on it:

http://pps.sagepub.com/content/8/4/445.full