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Updated: Jun 3, 2026
Assessment of Morphine-induced Hyperalgesia and Analgesic Tolerance in Mice Using Thermal and Mechanical Nociceptive Modalities
Published on: July 29, 2014
Placebo analgesia affects the behavioral despair tests and hormonal secretions in mice
Jian-You Guo1, Xiao-Ying Yuan, Feng Sui
1Key Laboratory of Mental Health, Institute of Psychology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, 10A Datun Road, Chaoyang District, Beijing 100101, People's Republic of China.
Rationale:
The placebo effect is a fascinating yet puzzling phenomenon, which has challenged investigators over the past 50 years. In previous studies, the investigators only focused on the placebo effect obtained within a single domain, and pain is the field in which most of the placebo research has been performed. However, recent research by our laboratory (Zhang and Luo in Psychophysiology 46:626-634, 2009; Zhang et al. 2011) showed that, in human subjects, the placebo effect can be transferred from one domain to the other, namely from pain to emotion.
Objectives:
The scope of this study was to investigate whether placebo analgesia could affect the depressive behavior in mice.
Materials And Methods:
Female C57/BL6 mice were trained to associate the context cue with elevated pain tolerance via a set of procedures. Then the forced swim test and tail suspension test were used to measure the depressive-like behaviors on the test day. Plasma concentrations of adrenocorticotropic hormone (ACTH) and corticosterone were also detected.
Results:
Our results showed that the placebo analgesia, which was established by a set of procedures in mice, was transferable and could produce a significant antidepressant effect on depressive test. Plasma levels of corticosterone and ACTH further proved that the placebo analgesia that was established from pain-reducing training not only induced a significant placebo effect on pain, but also decreased significantly the hypothalamus-pituitary-adrenal axis (HPA) response to stress and produced a stress-alleviating effect.
Conclusions:
These data show that placebo analgesia affects the behavioral despair tests and hormonal secretions in mice.
