Two decades of psychotherapy research conceptualizing placebos as variables common across psychotherapies are reviewed. Placebo treatments and placebo controls have been thought to be composed of factors common across psychotherapies by definition. Little empirical support, howevei; was found for this view. The components of placebo controls are not necessarily common with but are often very diiferent from the components of designated therapies. A review was also conducted of the more obvious as well as the more subtle sources of noncontrolled variables that may differentially enter therapeutic conditions. The types of placebo control groups most often used in the literature are not adequate to control the effects of various so-called nonspecific variables or to test the active elements of psychotherapies. Two types of placebo groups were found to be the most appropriate to control for confounding variables in the study of psychological processes and active therapeutic components.Traditionally, psychotherapies and placebos have been thought to belong to two different classes of treatments. In this view, therapies are unique and individual forms of treatments with mechanisms specific to some theoretical conceptualization, but placebos are composed of factors that are common to most types of therapy (Basham, 1986;Critelli & Neumann, 1984;O'Leary & Borkovec, 1978). It has been pointed out that placebo components are assumed to be common to the designated therapy and placebo control by definition (Wilkins, 1983). In addition, placebos are seen as having less specific or focused effects than legitimate psychotherapies (Shapiro & Morris, 1978). Both of these assumptions are overgeneralizations. This article presents an investigation of the nature of placebo controls and components based on their use in the literature. The review of two decades of the use of placebo controls in psychotherapy research indicates that the assumption that placebos are composed of common variables across therapies is not reflected in research designs. Therapies and placebo controls do not share common elements in a large proportion of the reviewed studies.Conditions that have been designated at one time or another as placebo components also vary considerably across therapies and are as unique as psychotherapy components. Placebos, like psychotherapies, have effects that are on target as well as effects that are off target or outside the specified problem. To the extent that both psychotherapies and placebos have clinically significant effects that are on target, they are legitimate forms of ther-

This study investigated the relationship of traditional social behavior to social communication via the Internet in a completely wired campus where every professor uses computers in classroom teaching, each residence is wired to the Internet, and every student is issued a laptop computer. It has been suggested that shy and socially isolated individuals communicate more on the Internet because it provides some protection from social anxiety. However, little research has empirically tested this assumption. In line with social network theory, we proposed, instead, that online social communication would complement or supplement the uses of face‐to‐face social contact resulting in a positive association between the two forms of social behaviors. We assessed the frequency and intimacy of traditional social behaviors, sociability, and shyness in 115 undergraduates (52 male, 63 female). These variables were then used to predict the frequency and intimacy of Internet social communication. Sociability and the frequency of traditional social behaviors were positively associated with the frequency of Internet social communication. The intimacy of traditional social behaviors was positively associated with the intimacy of Internet social communication. Overall, the findings supported the implications of social network theory in that online social communication appeared to complement or be an extension of traditional social behavior rather than being a compensatory medium for shy and socially anxious individuals. With relation to uses and gratifications theory, however, shyness was associated with increased intimate socializing over the Internet, indicating that traditional and Internet communication are not functionally equivalent.

This study investigated the effects of content and formal variables in therapeutic rationales on treatment expectancies. Five treatment descriptions were presented to undergraduates (N = 250). The rationales varied in terms of therapeutic focus, number of techniques, and the length of the description. There was no support for the influence of therapeutic focus on expectancies. One of the treatment descriptions raised greater expectancies than the control condition. The effects appeared to be due to the moderate length or amount of information in the rationale. Findings are explained in terms of the perceived clarity of the information and the adequate description of the treatments presented.

Health and illness are complex constructs for which a biomedical approach alone is insufficient. The purpose of the present study was to explore how personal attitudes toward health and illness affect health experience. By adopting a constructivist perspective, we carried out individual semistructured interviews with 15 persons enrolled in a yoga class in northern Italy. We analyzed the interview data using interpretative phenomenological analysis and found that participants' attitudes toward health and wellness were linked to their experiences and perceptions of health and illness, their somatic awareness, and their constructions of themselves and of their relations. The findings point toward the importance of people taking responsibility for their health. In addition, they suggest that health care should be personalized: approaching people as a complex unity and health and illness as inextricable parts of their lives. Keywords constructivism, health attitude, illness experience, qualitative analysisNowadays it is widely recognized that illness is closely related to social, psychological, and behavioral aspects of people's ways of life. Approximately the 50% of all morbidity and mortality causes in the United States is