My understanding is when you prune any plant, it will redirect growth to the roots unless it is under a major stress of some kind (I mean life-threatening, from the plant's point of view, not ours). The problem with peppers for a lot of people is they take a long time to ripen, so you have to weigh the risk of setting back ripening overall with the extra yield you'll get from pruning.
Johnny's suggests the cold treatment, which I don't understand the rationale for, mainly bc I can't do it anyway so haven't paid enough attention!
Link is here
http://www.johnnyseeds.com/growers-l...ansplants.html.