Hypnotic Susceptibility and Holistic/emotional Styles of Thinking

It has been suggested that an everyday preference for holistic and emotional thought is related to the ability to enter hypnosis, although research addressing the idea has often yielded inconsistent results. This study correlated hypnotic susceptibility, as measured by the Harvard Group Scale (Shor and Orne, 1962), with three measures of a holistic/emotional thinking style: the experiential sub-scale of the Rational Versus Experiential Inventory (RVEI) (Epstein et al., 1995), the right hemisphere sub-scale of the Human Information Processing Survey (HIPS) (Taggart and Torrance, 1984) and the elaborative processing sub-scale of the Inventory of Learning Processes (ILP) (Schmeck et al., 1977). A social desirability measure was also included. Only the experiential scale of the RVEI and the social desirability scale showed significant positive correlations with susceptibility; a multiple regression analysis showed the RVEI scale to be the best predictor of susceptibility. The implications of these results for the analytic-holistic hypothesis in hypnosis are discussed.