French Norms for the Online Sussex-Waterloo Scale of Hypnotizability

Abstract

This paper presents French norms for the online version of the Sussex-Waterloo Scale of Hypnotizability. This scale is an online adaptation of the well-established Waterloo-Stanford Group C scale of hypnotic susceptibility with both behavioural and subjective scores. Insofar as hypnotizability (the ability to respond to suggestions in a hypnotic context) varies substantially in the general population and remains generally stable throughout life, it is important to measure it in experiments using hypnotic suggestion. However, these scales are time consuming, as they often require multiple sessions in order to achieve a suitable sample size for subsequent participant screening. One promising route for overcoming this inconvenience is to perform hypnotizability assessment online. The Sussex-Waterloo Scale of Hypnotizability is the first to have demonstrated the viability of online measurement. We show that our translation of this scale yields similar statistics. Alongside recent critics of the classic scales of hypnotizability, we point to limitations of this scale and discuss ways of accommodating some of its drawbacks.