Graduate student Emily Spotts has published her article with Dr. Geers titled “The effect of attribute framing on beliefs and attitudes toward branded and generic medications.” was published through the Journal of Behavioral Medicine. link.springer.com/article/10.100… Congrats!

Research assistant Sydney Mockensturm received a summer research grant from the UToledo Office of Undergraduate Researcher for her research project titled "Testing Cognitive Dissonance, Control, and Confidence as Mediators for Treatment Choice on Placebo Eye Fatigue Outcomes."

Doctoral candidate Emily Spotts was recognized as one of the University of Toledo's Outstanding Graduate Students of the Year for her recent scholarly contributions. Congratulations, Emily!

Undergraduate student Legend Coleman is the recipient of the 2025 Dean's Leadership and Engagement Award at the University of Toledo. This is a great achievement! Congrats, Legend.

As the semester comes to a close and summer break begins, we want to thank all our undergraduate and graduate students for their hard work and contributions to the lab. Wishing you a wonderful and restful summer!

Interested in exploring the influence of social factors on health and treatment-related outcomes? We will be recruiting PhD students to join the Toledo Placebo Lab for Fall 2026! Applications (tinyurl.com/utpsychapply) are due Dec. 1st. Please direct interested undergrads here!

Graduate student Michael Vang has published his undergraduate independent research project from UC Merced, titled "Examining the causal role of physicians’ communication goals in patient outcomes." Check out the article at: journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.117…

Congratulations to undergraduate psychology honors student, Sydney Mockensturm, who presented her research on the influence of choice-making on the placebo effect at the 5th International Conference of the Society for Interdisciplinary Placebo Studies (SIPS).

Dr. Andrew Geers gave an invited plenary talk at the 5th International Conference of the Society for Interdisciplinary Placebo Studies (SIPS) in Krakow, Poland. The talk discussed the role of implicit processes in placebo and nocebo effects.

Graduate student Emily Spotts successfully proposed her dissertation titled "A Multi-Study Investigation into Nocebo Education as a Method of Reducing Treatment Side Effects." Congrats, Emily!

We’re excited to kick off the Fall semester and dive back into research! Our lab is looking forward to starting our research projects and making great progress this semester.

Graduate student Emily Spotts and PI Dr. Andrew Geers have an article in press entitled "Interventions that Inform Patients about Nocebo Effects: A Systematic Review of the Current Evidence”. Look for it this fall in Annals of Behavioral Medicine!

We are excited to share a new publication titled, “Not So Great Expectations: The Role of Price and Name Information in the Nocebo Effect,” with our collaborators! Read the full article by clicking on the link below. sciencedirect.com/science/articl…

Dr. Geers and Emily Spotts were awarded a grant for $2,500 from the Center for Open Science (COS) as part of the “Replicability Project: Health Behavior,” which is a large-scale, multi-team effort to replicate published quantitative health research studies. Congratulation!

We are thrilled to share that poster abstracts by graduate students Emily Spotts and Michael Vang, as well as undergraduate student Darine Schreidah, have been accepted for presentation at SPSP 2026! Congratulations to all! We hope to see you there as well!

Congratulations to Dr. Emily Spotts for successfully defending her dissertation, "A multi-study investigation into nocebo education as a method for reducing treatment side effects"! Emily's work examined ways to improve educational interventions about nocebo effects.

We are excited to share that Dr. Geers has co-authored a new book chapter titled “The COVID-19 Pandemic: A Special Case of Placebo and Nocebo Effects” in Placebo Effects in Neurology (Handbook of Clinical Neurology, Vol. 213). Read more here: pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/41161963/

We’re excited to kick off the Spring semester and dive back into research! Our lab is looking forward to starting our research projects and making great progress this semester.

We are excited to announce that Dr. Andrew Geers was recently elected to be a steering committee member leading the international association, The Society for Interdisciplinary Placebo Studies (SIPS).

The 2027 Society for Interdisciplinary Placebo Studies conference has been announced, and it will be held in Sydney, Australia, 9-12 February 2027. Here is a link to the conference webpage: sips2027.com