Can magical intervention affect subjective experiences? Adults' reactions to magical suggestion.

Children's and adults' reactions to magical and ordinary suggestion: are suggestibility and magical thinking psychologically close relatives?

In Experiment 1, 6- and 9-year-old children and adults were asked to imagine various types of objects. The experimenter then attempted to change the image of those objects in participants' minds by either suggesting that the objects may change against the participants' will, or by asking participants to change the objects as a favor to the experimenter. Two types of suggestive causation were em...

The Magical Level of Consciousness 1

This article describes the subjective experience, phenomenology, and lawfulness of the magical level of consciousness (or in Jungian terms the infrared pole of the psyche) as Jean Gebser describes it and as it plays itself out intrapersonally and interpersonally in psychotherapeutic relationships, in particular with so-called borderline clients. There is a comparison between the main characteri...

The permanence of mental objects: testing magical thinking on perceived and imaginary realities.

This study tested participants' preparedness to acknowledge that an object could change as a result of magical intervention. Six- and 9-year-old children and adults treated perceived and imagined objects as being equally permanent. Adults treated a fantastic object as significantly less permanent than either perceived or imagined objects. Results were similar when a different type of mental-phy...

Critique of Critiques/An Answer to Domesticated Magic: A Critique of the Domestication of Magical Realism in Iran, Mohsen Hanif

Magical thinking and memory: distinctiveness effect for tv commercials with magical content.

The aim of this study was to examine whether memorizing advertised products of television advertisements with magical effects (i.e., talking animals, inanimate objects which turn into humans, objects that appear from thin air or instantly turn into other objects) is easier than memorizing products of advertisements without such effects, by testing immediate and delayed retention. Adolescents an...