Placebo effects contribute to brief online mindfulness interventions for chronic pain: Results from an online randomized sham-controlled trial
Jonathan Nicholas Davies, Ben Colagiuri, Louise Sharpe et al. preprint
A single session of online mindfulness meditation was not superior to sham mindfulness or an audiobook control for reducing pain intensity or unpleasantness in 169 adults with chronic or recurrent pain. Mindfulness and both sham conditions reduced pain unpleasantness compared to audiobook control, and expectancy was most strongly associated with this effect. No differential engagement of theorized mindfulness-specific processes was observed. The findings suggest that improvements in chronic pain unpleasantness following a single online mindfulness session may be driven by placebo effects rather than mindfulness-specific mechanisms.