  We discuss the phenomenology of damping signatures in the neutrino
oscillation probabilities, where either the oscillating terms or the
probabilities can be damped. This approach is a possibility for tests of
non-oscillation effects in future neutrino oscillation experiments, where we
mainly focus on reactor and long-baseline experiments. We extensively motivate
different damping signatures due to small corrections by neutrino decoherence,
neutrino decay, oscillations into sterile neutrinos, or other mechanisms, and
classify these signatures according to their energy (spectral) dependencies. We
demonstrate, at the example of short baseline reactor experiments, that damping
can severely alter the interpretation of results, e.g., it could fake a value
of $\sin(2\theta_{13})$ smaller than the one provided by Nature. In addition,
we demonstrate how a neutrino factory could constrain different damping models
with emphasis on how these different models could be distinguished, i.e., how
easily the actual non-oscillation effects could be identified. We find that the
damping models cluster in different categories, which can be much better
distinguished from each other than models within the same cluster.
