Generalization: test phase—fear of unpleasant pictures
SHOCKS
After completing the choice phase—fear of shocks, we tested whether the placebo effect generalizes to the context of fear of unpleasant pictures. This phase included two counterbalanced 30-trials blocks, one for each distraction type. These two blocks were identical to the experience—fear of unpleasant pictures block in all aspects, except that instead of implementing the experience instruction, here participants implemented the placebo-distraction and the control-distraction while anticipating a possible unpleasant picture.Similar to the fear of shocks blocks, the exprerience—fear of unpleasant pictures block, the placebo-distraction generalization test block, and the control-distraction generalization test block, each included a total of 10 trials with unpleasant pictures. Picture trials were distributed pseudo-randomly, with the only rule being that the first/second trial must be an unpleasant picture trial. We created three 10-pictures lists of pictures with nearly identical average valence and arousal ratings (see Supplementary Table 