Johannes Laferton

Health and Medical University Potsdam · Medicine

Background Placebo effects contribute substantially to outcome in most fields of medicine. While clinical trials typically try to control or minimize these effects, the potential of placebo mechanisms to improve outcome is rarely used. Patient expectations about treatment efficacy and outcome are major mechanisms that contribute to these placebo ef...

Patients’ expectations in the context of medical treatment represent a growing area of research, with accumulating evidence suggesting their influence on health outcomes across a variety of medical conditions. However, the aggregation of evidence is complicated due to an inconsistent and disintegrated application of expectation constructs and the h...

Health care workers are at increased risk for mental health issues due to high psychological and physical job demands. According to a recent study, stress beliefs (i.e., believing stress to be detrimental to one's health) might influence physicians' mental health in response to a naturalistic stressor (COVID‐19 hospital working conditions). Due to...

Behandlungsmanual und Behandlungsmaterialien für die psychologische Kurzintervention zur Erwartungsoptimierung von Patienten vor herzchirurgischen Eingriffen im Rahmen der randomisiert-kontrollierten mulitzentrischen PSY-HEART-II-Studie.

Background: Negative beliefs about stress (e.g., "stress is bad") constitute an independent risk factor for increased morbidity and mortality. One potential underlying mechanism are altered responses to acute psychosocial stress. The aim of this study was to investigate whether beliefs about stress are associated with physiological and endocrine s...

Background Patients’ expectations, as a central mechanism behind placebo and nocebo effects, are an important predictor of health outcomes. Yet, theoretically based generic assessment tools allowing for an integrated understanding of expectations across conditions and treatments are lacking. Based on the preliminary 35-item version, this study repo...

The PSY-HEART-I trial indicated that a brief expectation-focused intervention prior to heart surgery improves disability and quality of life 6 months after coronary artery bypass graft surgery (CABG). However, to investigate the clinical utility of such an intervention, a large multi-center trial is needed to generalize the results and their implic...

This study examined whether baseline (3–14 days pre-surgery) levels of (i) depressive or (ii) anxiety symptoms and (iii) illness beliefs moderate the effects of additional preoperative interventions before coronary artery bypass graft surgery on (i) depressive or (ii) anxiety symptoms and (iii) illness beliefs 1 day before surgery, 1 week and 6 mon...

Patients’ expectations are among the most frequently studied psychological prognostic factors in total knee and hip arthroplasty (TKA/THA). So far, however, evidence on the effect of patients’ preoperative expectations on surgery outcome is inconclusive. Heterogeneity of expectation constructs and the use of psychometrically not evaluated measureme...

Patients’ expectations are among the most frequently studied psychological prognostic factors in total knee and hip arthroplasty (TKA/THA). So far, however, evidence on the effect of patients’ preoperative expectations on surgery outcome is inconclusive. Heterogeneity of expectation constructs and the use of psychometrically not evaluated measureme...

Patients’ expectations are among the most frequently studied psychological prognostic factors in total knee and hip arthroplasty (TKA/THA). So far, however, evidence on the effect of patients’ preoperative expectations on surgery outcome is inconclusive. Heterogeneity of expectation constructs and the use of psychometrically not evaluated measureme...

Introduction Inflammation has been related to several somatic and psychological disorders and may moderate effects of psychological interventions. In the PSY-HEART trial patients benefitted from preoperative psychological interventions before undergoing coronary artery bypass graft surgery (CABG) and, if necessary, concomitant valvular surgery, com...

Objective Patients’ expectations—as a central mechanism of placebo and nocebo effects—are an important predictor of health outcomes. However, the lack of a way to assess expectations across different settings restricts progress in understanding the role of expectations and to quantify their importance in medical and psychological treatments. The ai...

Background Negative beliefs about the effects of stress have been associated with poorer health and increased mortality. However, evidence on the psychological mechanisms linking stress beliefs to health is scarce, especially regarding real-life stress. Purpose The aim of the current study was to investigate the effects of stress beliefs on affect...

Objective: It has been suggested that patients' perception of treatment assignment might serve to bias results of double blind randomized controlled trials (RCT). Most previous evidence on the effects of patients' perceptions and the mechanisms influencing these perceptions relies on cross-sectional associations. This re-analysis of a double blind,...

Hintergrund: Patientenerwartungen gelten als wichtige Wirkmechanismen bei psychotherapeutischen und medizinischen Behandlungen und spielen für die Genesung eine große Rolle. Vor diesem Hintergrund wurde eine psychologische präoperative Kurzintervention zur Erwartungsoptimierung entwickelt, um den Genesungsprozess nach Herzoperationen positiv zu bee...

Background: A new approach of psychological interventions prior to stress aiming to optimize expectations may have beneficial effects on a person's health status by reducing physiological stress. The purpose of this experiment was to determine whether a brief psychological intervention designed to optimize personal control expectations prior to ac...

Objective: To examine whether preoperative psychological interventions targeting patients' expectations are capable of influencing the biological stress response after coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery and could thus improve recovery after heart surgery. Methods: Randomized controlled trial with assessments 10 days before surgery, post...

Objective: To examine the effect of a preoperative expectation-optimizing psychological intervention on length of stay in the hospital and time spent in the Intensive Care Unit (ICU) in patients undergoing elective cardiac surgery. Methods: In a randomized controlled trial, 124 patients prior to undergoing coronary artery bypass grafting (CABG)...

Evidence from population and experimental studies suggests that laypersons’ beliefs about stress influence mental and physical health. Yet, studies so far have solely relied on psychometrically not evaluated instruments to measure stress beliefs. Standardized assessment is needed to facilitate research on this novel and promising construct in stres...

Background: Almost nothing is known about the potential negative effects of Internet-based psychological treatments for depression. This study aims at investigating deterioration and its moderators within randomized trials on Internet-based guided self-help for adult depression, using an individual patient data meta-analyses (IPDMA) approach. Met...

Purpose: Medically unexplained symptoms are abundantly present in the general population. Stress may lead to increased symptom reporting because of widespread beliefs that it is dangerous for one's health. This study aimed at clarifying the role of stress beliefs in somatic symptom reporting using a quasi-experimental study design. Methods: Two...

Zusammenfassung. Theoretischer Hintergrund: Depressivität und Ängstlichkeit beeinträchtigen den Behandlungserfolg von herzchirurgischen Patienten. Fragestellung: Untersucht wurde, ob und wie präoperative Patientenerwartungen mit postoperativer Depressivität und Ängstlichkeit zusammenhängen und welche präoperativen Erwartungen hierbei den höchsten p...

Background: Among cardiac patients, positive psychological factors are consistently linked with superior clinical outcomes and improvement in key markers of inflammation and hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal axis functioning. Further, positive psychology interventions (PPI) have effectively increased psychological well-being in a wide variety of popul...

Objective Recent meta-analyses of antidepressant clinical trials have suggested that up to 82 % of response can be attributed to non-medication-related factors. The present study examines psychiatrists’ attitudes regarding non-pharmacologic factors within the context of antidepressant pharmacotherapy. Methods A web-based, 20-question cross-sectiona...

Objective: This randomized controlled trial evaluated the efficacy of an Internet-based intervention, which aimed to improve recovery from work-related strain in teachers with sleeping problems and work-related rumination. In addition, mechanisms of change were also investigated. Methods: A sample of 128 teachers with elevated symptoms of insomn...

Background Though the phenotype of anxiety about medical illness has long been recognized, there continues to be debate as to whether it is a distinct psychiatric disorder and, if so, to which diagnostic category it belongs. Our objective was to investigate the pattern of psychiatric co-morbidity in hypochondriasis and to assess the relationship o...

Several studies indicate that patients' presurgical expectations can influence postsurgical health outcome. To estimate the potential for clinical exploitation of this association, a meta-analysis of prospective studies which assess the association between patients' presurgical expectations and postsurgical quality of life is applied to accumulate...

Patients' expectations have shown to be a major psychological predictor of health outcome in cardiac surgery patients. However, it is unclear whether patients' expectations can be optimized prior to surgery. This study evaluates the development of a brief psychological intervention focusing on the optimization of expectations and its effect on chan...

Background: Heart surgery patients' expectations have been shown to be related to surgery outcome, independent of medical status. However, it is unclear which factors determine patients' expectations about disability following heart surgery. Purpose: Investigating the associations of patients' disability expectations with demographic, medical, a...

Patients‘ expectations have been identified as a major psychological predictor of course and outcome following cardiac surgery procedures. In addition, patients’ expectations have been shown to be modifiable through psychological interventions. However, few studies have tried to specifically change different aspects of patients’ expectations prior...