Pioneering research at the intersection of biology, neuroscience, and psychology is exploring the way our beliefs affect our well-being, with implications for public health and clinical efficacy.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1941,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1938","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-innovation","has-post-title","has-post-date","has-post-category","has-post-tag","has-post-comment","has-post-author",""],"builder_content":"
![\"Dr.](\"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/05\/Liron-Rosenkrantz-scaled.jpeg\")
Dr. Liron Rosenkrantz[\/caption] Back when the Azrieli Faculty of Medicine\u2019s Dr. Liron Rozenkrantz was pursuing her undergraduate degree in neuroscience at Bar-Ilan, she kept returning to one question: Why should we stop there? \u201cThere,\u201d in this instance, was the study of the effects of our mental processes, such as beliefs and expectations, on the physiological processes that cause pain. Or, in simpler terms, the placebo effect. \u201cAlready back then, we understood the neurobiological mechanisms at work in blocking pain in the spinal cord,\u201d says Rozenkrantz. \u201cBut I wanted to know, why aren\u2019t our beliefs having neurobiological effects in every area of life? And if they are, why aren\u2019t we trying to harness those beliefs to improve our health and well-being?\u201d<\/p>
After a Ph.D. at the Weizmann Institute, postdoctoral research at MIT, and a fellowship in the Program in Placebo Studies at Harvard University, Rozenkrantz is now doing just that in her Psychobiology of Beliefs Lab, which studies people\u2019s behavior, physiological responses, hormonal levels, and blood biomarkers to determine how beliefs influence our metabolic processes (\u201cBelieving that a certain food is nourishing can lead us to feel full, biologically speaking,\u201d Rozenkrantz explains, \u201ceven if it has no more calories or nutrients than another, lesser option\u201d) and immune systems. In the case of the latter, the Covid-19 pandemic provided the perfect conditions: In a study of hundreds of patients who had yet to contract the virus, Rozenkrantz showed that simply believing that one is likely to develop severe symptoms makes the development of those symptoms more likely. Indeed, perceptions about the robustness of our own immunity\u2014more than anxiety about the virus itself, or the fear of infection\u2014predicts our experience of symptoms with remarkable accuracy. Rozenkrantz developed these findings into a \u201cPerceived Immunity Scale,\u201d a tool that measures the interplay between our beliefs about our immunity and our day-to-day health. Her work, which was published last May in the prestigious British Journal of Health Psychology<\/em>, can help both researchers and healthcare providers when studying and selecting treatments for both acute and chronic illness.<\/p> \u201cToday, there\u2019s a huge emphasis on improving preventive health measures such as diet and exercise. But what we\u2019re learning is that improving our health beliefs is no less critical to our well-being,\u201d says Rozenkrantz. \u201cWe believe that altering our health beliefs can affect our ability to manage chronic illness, obesity, even depression. But you don\u2019t have to take our word for it,\u201d she says with a smile. \u201cWe have the neurobiological evidence to prove it.\u201d<\/p>","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1938","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1938"}],"version-history":[{"count":12,"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1938\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2819,"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1938\/revisions\/2819"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1941"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1938"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1938"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/presidentreport.biu.ac.il\/2025\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1938"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}