An Empirically-Based Formulation of Hypnotism

Intelligence and Hypnotizability:Is There a Connection?

“…Intelligence as a biological category gains a lower status in comparison with intelligence as a social and acquirable category-similar to hypnotizability and hypnotic susceptibility, respectively. The so-called special-state debate (e.g., Barber, 1969;Kirsch, 2011) and the dispute about the trainability of hypnotizability (e.g., Spanos & Flynn, 1989) are examples of that. This discourse over the nature of hypnosis started in the 1970s and dominated the conversation in the hypnosis community for a quarter of a century.…”

Applied psychological hypnosis: Management of problematic situations.

“…High-level inference is used when the procedures are described as producing an altered state known as a trance (E. Hilgard, 1969). High-level inference explanations have been found to conflict with research on the mechanisms of hypnotic suggestibility (Barber, 1969) and the ambiguous nature of the subjective experience of hypnosis (Radke & Spanos, 1981). Furthermore, the description and explanation of hypnotic procedures can have important effects on client compliance.…”

Hypnotherapy: A reappraisal.

“…Although many have thought that hypnotic susceptibility was a set character trait, there are a number of studies which now seem to indicate that this is not the case, and that responsiveness can be increased by certain changes in the hypnotic induction procedure (Pascal and Salzberg, 1959;Sachs and Anderson, 1967;Baykushev, 1969), as well as by means of a pre-induction talk aimed at insuring a positive attitude, an appropriate expectancy and a high motivation toward hypnosis (Dorcus, 1963;Barber, 1969;Barrios, 1969).…”

“…As pointed out in the theory (Barrios, 1969), hypnotic and waking suggestion are on the same continuum and hypnotic induction should be looked upon as a procedure whereby we can increase the probability of getting a more positive response to suggestion. The next question to be decided now is not so much whether hypnotic induction procedures increase responsive-ness (this is fairly well accepted-e.g., Barber, 1969) but what variables in the hypnotic induction are playing the key roles and what can be done to strengthen the effectiveness of these factors.…”