The Highly Hypnotizable Person

Theoretical, Experimental and Clinical Issues

Michael Heap, Richard J. Brown, David A. Oakley, Michael Heap, Richard J. Brown, David A. Oakley

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2004
• ISBN:
  9781135480219
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Psychology
• Subtopic: Psychotherapy
• Index: Psychology

It is commonly known that some individuals are more easily hypnotized than others. What is less clear is why, and what can be learnt from these individual differences for hypnosis as a whole. The Highly Hypnotizable Person i s the first book to present an up-to-date, comprehensive overview of what research and evidence there is for the existence and features of highly hypnotisable people. The Highly Hypnotizable Person draws on research findings from cognitive, developmental and clinical psychology and from neuropsychology and neurophysiology. Leading authorities on hypnosis provide a comprehensive account of what is known and understood about this phenomenon and treatment procedure, and in particular, the nature and implications of high susceptibility.

Chapter 1
High hypnotizability
Key issues

Michael Heap, Richard J. Brown and David A. Oakley

Introduction

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an overview of hypnosis for the reader who is unfamiliar with the subject. We will not review theories of hypnosis in any great depth, but sufficiently so to highlight the main theoretical controversies. We state the case that those people who score high on hypnotic susceptibility scales may be an interesting population for study both within and outside of the hypnotic context, by social, cognitive, developmental and clinical psychologists and, in recent years, neuropsychologists. Many of the themes that we cover in this chapter will be taken up in depth by the other contributors to this book.

The nature of hypnosis

A consideration of the meaning of the term ‘hypnosis’ requires us to acknowledge at least two ways in which it is commonly used. One way is by reference to the actions of the hypnotist. This is typified by the definition given by Heap et al. (2001) in a report on hypnosis commissioned by the British Psychological Society.

The term ‘hypnosis’ denotes an interaction between one person, the ‘hypnotist’, and another person or other people, the ‘subject’ or ‘subjects’. In this interaction the hypnotist attempts to influence the subjects’ perceptions, feelings, thinking and behaviour by asking them to concentrate on ideas and images that may evoke the intended effects. The verbal communications that the hypnotist uses to achieve these effects are termed ‘suggestions’.

(p.)

It will be seen that this definition says nothing about whether or not the subject actually responds in the intended ways. Other definitions of hypnosis have the experience of the subject as their focus, and in fact the above report goes on to refer this. We shall return to this matter in due course. To begin with, we will describe some of the features that characterize a ‘typical’ hypnotic interaction.

The hypnotic induction

A session of hypnosis usually begins with a ‘hypnotic induction’, which may involve one or more of a considerable range of procedures. Although most theorists (with the notable exception of Edmonston, 1981, 1991) do not consider that relaxation is an essential property of hypnosis, the most commonly used methods consist of suggestions that direct the subjects to relax and to become absorbed in their thoughts, imagery and feelings. Examples are progressive muscular relaxation, relaxed breathing, pleasant and calming imagery, and suggestions of relaxation coupled with an ideosensory or ideomotor response (see below), the most popular being eyelid heaviness and arm levitation. Typically there will be a series of two, three or four such procedures, the later ones in the sequence being designated as ‘deepening’ methods.

Traditionally, the role of the hypnotic induction and deepening routine is conceived as a means by which the subject is guided into a special altered state of consciousness or ‘hypnotic trance’, one of the major properties of which is hyper-suggestibility. We return to this issue below.

Hypnotic suggestion

Following the induction and deepening procedures, the hypnotist typically makes suggestions for the subject to experience a range of phenomena, depending on the purposes of the hypnotic interaction, be it research, therapy or entertainment.

One common type of suggestion is ‘ideomotor suggestion’ in which the idea is conveyed of a simple, automatic movement of a part of the body, such as a finger or arm. This kind of suggestion often also includes the idea of some alteration in perceptual experience, say, in the case of arm levitation, a feeling of lightness in the arm. This exemplifies an ‘ideosensory suggestion’, others being suggestions of coldness, numbness, warmth or heaviness in a part of the body.

Inhibition of a movement may also be suggested, such as arm immobility or eye catalepsy. Suggestions of this sort are commonly described as ‘challenge’ suggestions in the experimental literature, to convey the idea that the subject is unable to perform a movement (e.g. move their arm, open their eyes) even when challenged to do so.

Very often suggestions are augmented by descriptions of appropriate imagery, such as a helium-filled balloon in the case of arm levitation, or immersion of the hand in icy water in the case of suggested hand numbness (glove anaesthesia).

Visual experiences may be the target of the suggestion (e.g. ‘When you open your eyes you will see your best friend standing in front of you’), likewise auditory, olfactory or gustatory. In the literature, responses to these kinds of suggestions are sometimes termed ‘hallucinations’ to convey the quality of realness that the responsive subject often reports. The suggestion may also be expressed in the negative sense, as in the example ‘When you open your eyes you will not see the chair in front of you’ or ‘You will hear nothing but the sound of my voice’.

Finally, some suggestions call for rather complex experiences and enactments, as in the case of the suggestion of reliving an early memory (‘age regression’) or progressing in time to some future event. Others include amnesia for all or some of the events during the hypnotic session, and time distortion (the idea that time is slowing down or speeding up).

In the experimental literature, suggestions that call for significant alterations in experience (e.g. hallucinations, amnesia, analgesia) are collectively described as ‘cognitive’ suggestions.

With most of the above suggestions it is sometimes stipulated that the response is to take place after the conclusion of hypnosis, in which case we use the term ‘posthypnotic suggestion’. For example, the subjects may be told that at some stage after they have opened their eyes, the hypnotist will take out his or her handkerchief and they will immediately remove their left shoe.

Some people may wish to define hypnosis in terms of the subject’s response. It can be seen that for many of the above examples of suggestion, such as arm levitation, whether the subject does respond will be immediately apparent to the hypnotist. For some, however, amnesia being an example, we may have to rely on the subject’s own report. In fact, in most cases there are objective signs that we can look for. For example, a suggestion of drinking water may be accompanied by the subject’s licking his or her lips and swallowing. Likewise, the effectiveness of suggesting an exciting experience may be assessed by observing the subject’s emotional reactions. With a suggestion such as hand warming or physical relaxation we can measure any physiological change if we are more interested in the actual rather than perceived effect. There is, however, one important characteristic of a successful suggested response. As Heap et al. (2001) state: ‘Suggestions differ from everyday kinds of instructions in that they imply that a “successful” response is experienced by the subject as having a quality of involuntariness or effortlessness’ (p.).

This characteristic is often called ‘the classic suggestion effect’. In contrast, a subject may objectively show a good response to the suggestion of arm levitation, the arm rising high in the air, but he or she may simply be deliberately lifting the arm. Or, another subject may show a diminished pain response in the hand following the suggestion of glove anaesthesia, but may be consciously employing a strategy such as self-distraction. Although this distinction, as the reader will discover later in this book, is not without controversy, in neither case are these subjects said to be responding in the classic manner to the hypnotist’s suggestion.

The measurement of hypnotic suggestion and individual differences in responsiveness

Clearly, a subject’s response to a given suggestion can be measured, sometimes in several different ways. This fact paved the way for the development of standardized scales for the systematic assessment of subject responsivity to hypnotic suggestions in the 1950s and 1960s. These scales typically comprise a hypnotic induction followed by a series of test suggestions and an assessment of the subject’s responsiveness to each. The number of suggestions successfully responded to is summed, yielding a total score denoting the subject’s responsivity. Within the general population, scores on these instruments have a broad distribution and a clear central tendency. In this book, the term hypnotizability is defined operationally as the number of suggestions that an individual responds to on standard scales of this sort. The terms hypnotizability, hypnotic susceptibility, hypnotic suggestibility and hypnotic responsivity are used interchangeably throughout.

Further discussion of hypnotic susceptibility scales will be deferred until Chapter 2. For the time being, it is instructive to note that hypnotizability research has yielded the following important findings.

1. There are significant and reliable differences between hypnotic suggestions in the proportion of subjects who respond to (i.e. ‘pass’) them. On the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale Form C (SHSS:C; Weitzenhoffer and Hilgard, 1962), for example, 92 per cent of subjects in the normative group passed the ‘hand lowering’ suggestion, 43 per cent passed ‘age regression’ and only 9 per cent passed ‘negative visual hallucination’. In this sense, it is meaningful to talk about some suggestions being more ‘difficult’ than others. Broadly speaking, ideomotor suggestions tend to be the easiest suggestions to pass, challenge suggestions are somewhat more difficult, and cognitive suggestions are the most difficult of all.
2. Most hypnotizability measures have high internal consistency, demonstrating that responsivity to one hypnotic suggestion is highly correlated with responsivity to others on the scale.
3. A person’s score on any of these scales tends to remain unchanged over time, suggesting that hypnotic susceptibility is a stable individual characteristic or trait. Thus Piccione et al. (1989), have found that hypnotizability has high test–retest reliability over a period of 25 years, while a twin study by Morgan (1973) suggests that hypnotizability may be partly inherited. Some authorities have challenged the trait conception of hypnotic responsiveness and this point will be taken up again below and in Chapter 9.

Hypnotizability has been found to correlate with a range of attributes such as trait ‘absorption’, dissociative capacity, and fantasy-proneness (see below and, in particular, Chapter 2), although in the first two cases the correlations are neither high nor stable across different studies. This theme will be taken up in later chapters but it is worth noting here that one explanation for this is that the population defined as highly susceptible may not be homogeneous (see e.g. Barber, 1999). A discussion of typology will be deferred until Chapter 3.

Current theoretical approaches to hypnosis

The requirement of any theory of hypnosis is that it provides explanations of the phenomena we observe. In addition we must be able to assess the validity of these explanations, by testing the predictions that they generate, modifying or abandoning the theory if the predictions are not supported. For example, if we explain suggested amnesia as being due to subject compliance, we would predict that more compliant subjects would be more likely to pass this suggestion.

However, we first must decide what it is we are trying to explain. A good answer to this is the ‘counter-expectational’ nature of the subject’s behaviour and experience (Coe and Sarbin, 1991). For instance, we do not expect that people will immediately forget something when we tell them to do so, and remember it again when we tell them that they can, likewise that they will not feel pain, that they will see their best friend greeting them, that they will smell a foul odour, that they will not see a chair that is in front of them, and so on. Here we note once again the importance of the involuntariness of the subjective and objective responses. That is, none of the aforementioned observations would be considered ‘counter-expectational’ if they were achieved by some kind of deliberate strategy on the subject’s part, such as distraction of attention in the case of suggested analgesia or amnesia. Another possibility is that the ‘responsive’ subject is simply reporting that he or she is having the suggested experiences when such is not the case, and voluntarily enacting the appropriate responses. In other words, he or she is being compliant. We shall take up these themes again in due course.

Hence a theory will have to explain the occurrence of these phenomena, but it will also have to account for why some people do not respond in the suggested manner, whereas some respond very markedly, why responsiveness is so consistent, and why it is distributed in the way it is.

The concept of ‘altered state’ or ‘trance’

The classic approach to these questions is that the ‘counter-expectational’ nature of suggested phenomena is explained by the properties of an altered state of consciousness or ‘trance’, which the subject enters as a result of the hypnotic induction procedure, and leaves following alerting instructions at the end of the session. The idea of a trance state that endows the subject with unusual characteristics and abilities has a long history outside of hypnosis and is common to many religious and qua...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contributors
• Introduction
• Chapter 1: High Hypnotizability: Key Issues
• Chapter 2: Defining and Identifying the Highly Hypnotizable Person
• Chapter 3: High Hypnotizability: Unity and Diversity In Behaviour and Experience
• Chapter 4: High Hypnotizability In a Sociocognitive Framework
• Chapter 5: Developmental Determinants of High Hypnotizability
• Chapter 6: Neurophysiological and Genetic Determinants of High Hypnotizability
• Chapter 7: An Integrative Cognitive Theory of Hypnosis and High Hypnotizability
• Chapter 8: Clinical Correlates of High Hypnotizability
• Chapter 9: Enhancing Hypnotizability
• Chapter 10: High Hypnotizability: Relevance and Utility to Cognitive and Clinical Psychology?