Malfliet A, et al. - Researchers examined the effect of verbally delivered treatment expectations on clinical outcomes in physical therapy practice. Further, they determined if changes in cortisol levels are associated with changes in neck pain and disability. During physical therapy interventions, they randomly allocated 83 patients with chronic neck pain to 3 different verbally delivered expectations (positive, negative, neutral). The positive and neutral expectations groups displayed significant improvement in pain. For salivary cortisol levels, the neutral and negative expectations groups showed a significant increase in response to treatment. They identified no marked correlations between changes in salivary cortisol levels and the change in pain in the neutral and negative expectations groups. Researchers thus recommend physical therapists treating people with chronic neck pain to be attentive when communicating the expected treatment effects to their patients.