The relationship between transliminality, hypnotic and imaginative suggestibility, and other personality traits.

Abstract

Transliminality may be considered as the tendency for an individual to experience a blurring of boundaries between unconscious and conscious states. The purpose of this study was to assess the relationship between transliminality, suggestibility (hypnotic and imaginative) and a range of other personality traits. Despite several hypotheses being proposed on the relationship between transliminality and hypnotisability, no empirical study has directly examined this link before. The assumption is that high transliminality, which relates to thin boundaries and the potential for information to flow more easily in a bi-directional manner between subconsciousness and consciousness, will be associated with suggestibility (and in particular hypnotic suggestibility and subjective experiential responses to suggestion).In the present study, participants (n=456) completed online a set of self-report personality questionnaires, where 4 scales were administered: The Revised Transliminality Scale, The Tellegen Absorption Scale, the Creative Experiences Questionnaire, and the Dissociative Experiences Scale II. To avoid context effects, in a separate and stand-alone study, hypnotic and imaginative suggestibility screenings were conducted using the Carleton University Responsiveness to Suggestion Scale (imaginative suggestibility, n = 328; hypnotic suggestibility, n=243). Of those people who completed both the online personality questionnaires and the in-person suggestibility screening, and whose data could be merged, 140 had done the imaginative suggestibility screening, and 127 had done the hypnotic suggestibility screening.Transliminality was found to be weakly correlated with the imaginative suggestibility subjective response measure (r = .19). Likewise, weak correlations were found between transliminality and the hypnotic suggestibility response measures (objective, r = .21, subjective, r = .23, involuntariness, r = .24). The results of forward multiple regression modelling reflected the observed pattern of correlations, with no model for any of the variables, including more than a single significant predictor. Transliminality served as a significant predictor for the subjective imaginative suggestibility measure, and for both the hypnotic suggestibility objective and subjective measure. In summary, this study, which avoided context effects (between the personality questionnaires and the suggestibility screenings) and which assessed suggestibility using a number of measures (hypnotic, imaginative; objective, subjective, involuntariness response), shows transliminality to be a weak predictor of response to suggestion. The pattern of correlations points towards transliminality being more closely linked to hypnotic rather than imaginative suggestibility, and to be associated more with experiential as opposed to objective measures of response to suggestion.