Hypnotizability in the Clinic, Viewed from the Laboratory.

A recent international survey discovered that clinicians who use hypnosis in their practice rarely assess the hypnotizability of their patients or clients. This contrasts sharply with the practice in laboratory research. One reason offered for this discrepancy is that hypnotizability does not strongly predict clinical outcome.

Recognition in Posthypnotic Amnesia, Revisited.

Three experiments studied recognition during posthypnotic amnesia (PHA) employing confidence ratings rather than the traditional yes/no format. As the criterion for recognition was loosened, an increase in hits was accompanied by an increase in false alarms, especially to distractor items that were conceptually related to, or semantically associated with, targets. Nevertheless, hits exceeded false alarms at every level of confidence.

Ecological Validity and "Ecological Validity".

Egon Brunswik coined the term to refer to the correlation between perceptual cues and the states and traits of a stimulus. Martin Orne adapted the term to refer to the generalization of experimental findings to the real world outside the laboratory. Both are legitimate uses of the term because the ecological validity of the cues in an experiment determines the ecological validity of the experiment itself.

There is more to memory than recollection and familiarity.

Theoretical models of memory retrieval have focused on processes of recollection and familiarity. Research suggests that there are still other processes involved in memory reconstruction, leading to experiences of knowing and inferring the past. Understanding these experiences, and the cognitive processes that give rise to them, seems likely to further expand our understanding of the neural substrates of memory.

Varieties of recollective experience.

Four variants on Tulving's "Remember/Know" paradigm supported a tripartite classification of recollective experience in recognition memory into Remembering (as in conscious recollection of a past episode), Knowing (similar to retrieval from semantic memory), and Feeling (a priming-based judgment of familiarity). Recognition-by-knowing and recognition-by-feeling are differentiated by level of processing at the time of encoding (Experiments 1-3), shifts in the criterion for item recognition (Experiment 2), response latencies (Experiments 1-3), and changes in the response window (Experiment 3). False recognition is often accompanied by "feeling", but rarely by "knowing"; d' is higher for knowing than for feeling (Experiments 1-4).

Realism and constructivism in social perception.

Jussim's critique of social psychology's embrace of error and bias is needed and often persuasive. In opting for perceptual realism over social constructivism, however, he seems to ignore a third choice - a cognitive constructivism which has a long and distinguished history in the study of nonsocial perception, and which enables us to understand both accuracy and error.

Hypnotic Tactile Anesthesia: Psychophysical and Signal-Detection Analyses.

Two experiments that studied the effects of hypnotic suggestions on tactile sensitivity are reported. Experiment 1 found that suggestions for anesthesia, as measured by both traditional psychophysical methods and signal-detection procedures, were linearly related to hypnotizability. Experiment 2 employed the same methodologies in an application of the real-simulator paradigm to examine the effects of suggestions for both anesthesia and hyperesthesia.

Patterns of hypnotic response, revisited.

It has long been speculated that there are discrete patterns of responsiveness to hypnotic suggestions, perhaps paralleling the factor structure of hypnotizability. An earlier study by Brenneman and Kihlstrom (1986), employing cluster analysis, found evidence for 12 such profiles. A new study by Terhune (2015), employing latent profile analysis, found evidence for three such patterns among highly hypnotizable subjects, and a fourth comprising subjects of medium hypnotizability.

Neuro-hypnotism: prospects for hypnosis and neuroscience.

The neurophysiological substrates of hypnosis have been subject to speculation since the phenomenon got its name. Until recently, much of this research has been geared toward understanding hypnosis itself, including the biological bases of individual differences in hypnotizability, state-dependent changes in cortical activity occurring with the induction of hypnosis, and the neural correlates of response to particular hypnotic suggestions (especially the clinically useful hypnotic analgesia). More recently, hypnosis has begun to be employed as a method for manipulating subjects' mental states, both cognitive and affective, to provide information about the neural substrates of experience, thought, and action.

Hypnosis in the right hemisphere.

Speculations about the neural substrates of hypnosis have often focused on the right hemisphere (RH), implying that RH damage should impair hypnotic responsiveness more than left-hemisphere (LH) damage. The present study examined the performance of a patient who suffered a stroke destroying most of his LH, on slightly modified versions of two hypnotizability scales. This patient was at least modestly hypnotizable, as indicated in particular by the arm rigidity and age regression items, suggesting that hypnosis can be mediated by the RH alone - provided that the language capacities normally found in the LH remain available.

Allocation of attentional resources in posthypnotic suggestion.

Highly hypnotizable subjects received a nonhypnotic instruction to respond to a particular digit in a display and a posthypnotic suggestion to respond to a different digit. On some test trials, these 2 responses were tested separately; on others, they were placed in conflict. Overall, subjects were no more responsive to posthypnotic cues than to nonhypnotic cues, nor did their response latencies differ.

Prospects for de-automatization.

Research by Raz and his associates has repeatedly found that suggestions for hypnotic agnosia, administered to highly hypnotizable subjects, reduce or even eliminate Stroop interference. The present paper sought unsuccessfully to extend these findings to negative priming in the Stroop task. Nevertheless, the reduction of Stroop interference has broad theoretical implications, both for our understanding of automaticity and for the prospect of de-automatizing cognition in meditation and other altered states of consciousness.

Placebo: feeling better, getting better, and the problems of mind and body.

Over its history, medicine has vacillated between acknowledging placebo effects as important and trying to overcome them. Placebos are controversial, in part, because they appear to challenge a biocentric view of the scientific basis of medical practice. At the very least, research should distinguish between the effects of placebos on subjective and objective endpoints.

Dissociative disorders.

The dissociative disorders, including "psychogenic" or "functional" amnesia, fugue, dissociative identity disorder (DID, also known as multiple personality disorder), and depersonalization disorder, were once classified, along with conversion disorder, as forms of hysteria. The 1970s witnessed an "epidemic" of dissociative disorder, particularly DID, which may have reflected enthusiasm for the diagnosis more than its actual prevalence. Traditionally, the dissociative disorders have been attributed to trauma and other psychological stress, but the existing evidence favoring this hypothesis is plagued by poor methodology.

Associative and categorical relations in the associative memory illusion.

What kinds of associations underlie the associative memory illusion? In Experiment 1, lists composed of horizontal, or coordinate, free associates elicited false recognition of critical lures much more often than did lists composed of vertical, or subordinate, category instances. Experiment 2 replicated this result, and showed that the difference between free associates and category instances was not an artifact of differential levels of forward or backward associative strength. Associative structure plays an important role in the associative memory illusion: The illusion is strongest when the critical lure lies at the same level of categorization as the studied items.

Unity within psychology, and unity between science and practice.

The unity of psychology as a science is to be found in its definition as the science of mental life, and its explanation of individual behavior in terms of mental states. This disciplinary focus will help negotiate psychology's relations with other disciplines, such as neuroscience and cognitive science. The unity within psychology between science and practice is to be found in a focus on scientific evidence as the source of the status, autonomy, and privileges of professional practitioners.

The fox, the hedgehog, and hypnosis.

Isaiah Berlin's contrast between the fox, who "knows many things," and the hedgehog, who "knows one big thing," is the starting point for a consideration of monolithic and pluralistic approaches to hypnosis.

Mesmer, the Franklin Commission, and hypnosis: a counterfactual essay.

The author reviews the social and scientific context for both Mesmer's theory of animal magnetism and the evaluation of that theory by the Franklin Commission. If Mesmer had never lived, someone else would have introduced magnets into medicine; and if the Franklin Commission had never met, someone else would have found the theory of animal magnetism invalid. Mesmer's theory was an imperfect analogy conditioned by the scientific vocabulary of his time, and the Franklin Commission's debunking of his theory left Mesmer's effects both unchallenged and unexplained.