Clinicians and researchers typically report that children are more hypnotizable than adults. An estimated 60–90% of children are highly hypnotizable, compared with just 10–15% of adults (Gardner & Olness, 1981). Even if we take these estimates with a grain of salt, putative explanations for this phenomenon must consider developmental factors including the role of behavior, imagination, dependen...

In his commentary, MacLeod (2011) presents a rich testing ground for elucidating how suggestion may operationalize attention. The effects of posthypnotic suggestions on Stroop performance raise theoretical questions regarding the nature of the underlying mechanisms. Beyond the methodological designs outlined by MacLeod, one way to address these questions is to examine data from embedded Stroop ...

The present study investigated the effectiveness of an operant conditioning approach for increasing hypnotic susceptibility. Results revealed significant increases in hypnotic susceptibility, significant generalization to a new set of more difficult items, and no substantial decrease in the stability of improvement. Attitudinal, motivational, and learning factors were considered in relation to ...

Four important investigations were reported during the latter part of 2001. All address the biological impact of hypnotic interventions. Three of these studies focus specifically on if and how hypnotic interventions affect immune functions. A range of immune assays is employed, from allergic response to blood-based assays of immune functioning during nonlaboratory periods of stress. In all 3 ca...

According to the ‘cold control theory’ of Dienes and Perner (2007) hypnotic responding is intimately linked to metacognition. Specifically, we proposed that what makes a hypnotic response hypnotic is the intentional performance of a (physical or mental) action while having inaccurate higher order thoughts to the effect that one was not intending the action. That is, the essence of hypnosis is a...

In the present work sedative and hypnotic effects of aqueous extract of Aloe vera in rats have been investigated. In order to evaluate the overall hypnotic effects of the Aloe vera extract, open field and loss of righting reflex tests were primarily used. The sedative and hypnotic effects of the extract were then confirmed by detection of remarkable raise in the total sleeping time through anal...

High hypnotic suggestibility is a heterogeneous condition and there is accumulating evidence that highly suggestible individuals may be comprised of discrete subtypes with dissimilar cognitive and phenomenological profiles. This study applied latent profile analysis to response patterns on a diverse battery of difficult hypnotic suggestions in a sample of individuals in the upper range of hypno...

The present study investigated how the magnitude the word blindness suggestion effect on Stroop interference depended on hypnotic suggestibility when given as an imaginative suggestion (i.e. not post-hypnotic suggestion) and under conditions in which hypnosis was not mentioned. Hypnotic suggestibility is shown to be a significant predictor of the magnitude of the imaginative word blindness sugg...

This paper was designed to examine the relationship between hypnotic susceptibility and cardiovascular measures, especially parasympathetic activity, in 3 separate studies. In these studies, neither heart rate nor heart rate variability differed between the high and low hypnotically susceptible individuals at the initial baseline. Furthermore, in the first study, experimental tasks designed to ...

The scant literature on the sequelae of hypnotizability-measurement instruments indicates that different scales produce different reactions. The Waterloo-Stanford Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility, Form C (WSGC) was developed as a group version of the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale, Form C (SHSS:C). Parallel to the literature showing that the SHSS:C can produce more negative aftere...