IN MEMORIAM: Emily Carota Orne, 1938-2016.

Emily Carota Orne, wife of the late Martin T. Orne and his companion in research for almost 40 years, passed away on August 1, 2016, from amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. Emily Orne was born in Boston on September 7, 1938, to Ruth Farrell Carota and Emil Carota. As an undergraduate at Bennington College, she did a fieldwork term at the Massachusetts Mental Health Center, which brought her into contact with Martin, who was Senior Research Psychiatrist there, and Director of the Studies in Hypnosis Project. After graduation in 1959, she did graduate work in psychology at Brandeis University, where she was taught by Abraham Maslow, Ulric Neisser, and Walter Toman. Emily and Martin were married in 1962 and worked together for the next 38 years. In 1964, the Orne laboratory, known as the Unit for Experimental Psychiatry, moved to the Institute of Pennsylvania Hospital and the University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine, in Philadelphia, where she was a Research Associate of Psychology in Psychiatry. Martin died in 2000, and Emily retired in 2014. Emily’s most salient contribution to hypnosis research was to develop, with Ronald E. Shor, the Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility, Form A, an adaptation for group administration of Weitzenhoffer and Hilgard’s Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale, Form A. The Harvard Scale introduced substantial economies into the assessment of hypnotizability and made it possible for investigators of even limited resources to become involved in hypnosis research. By any standard, it has been the most frequently employed measure of hypnotizability by researchers worldwide, having been cited almost 1500 times (according to Google Scholar) and been translated into many languages. Emily was particularly concerned with the forensic use of hypnosis and was a leading figure in the debate over the hypnotic recovery of memories of child sexual abuse and other traumas. She coauthored influential studies that warned of the dangers that the suggestive nature of hypnosis posed for the accuracy of memory and cautioned that any memory “recovered” through hypnosis should be independently confirmed. She was also interested in the medical applications of hypnosis and published a number of studies on the use of hypnosis in pain relief and stress management in children with sickle-cell disease. Through all of her research, Emily insisted—as Martin did—that the effects of hypnosis were “real” in the sense that they were subjectively Intl. Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 65(1): 1–3, 2017 Copyright © International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis ISSN: 0020-7144 print / 1744-5183 online DOI: 10.1080/00207144.2016.1248121