Hypnosis and implicit memory: automatic processing of explicit content

Implicit Rapport: Some Introductory Comments

"The relationship" is often cited as an essential aspect of successful psychotherapy, but what is it about the relationship that contributes to positive outcomes in treatment? This article introduces the concept of implicit rapport, which, in the parlance of social psychology, is an element of influence. Influence represents those things to which people respond without awareness of what exactly they are responding. Implicit rapport is here defined as a category of behaviors or interventions that occur within the context of clinical encounters and are designed or intended to promote a sense of feeling known, understood, valued, and safe. It is characterized as implicit because the variety of interactions referred to are not likely to be overtly or explicitly recognized by the client but, nonetheless, influences their willingness to commit to the work of psychotherapy. Clinical vignettes are presented to provide examples of how implicit rapport is conceptualized and actualized.

An eye for an I: a 35-year-old woman with fluctuating oculomotor deficits and dissociative identity disorder

Physiologic changes, including neurological or pseudo-neurological symptoms, occur across identity states in dissociative identity disorder DID) and can be objectively measured. The idea that dissociative phenomena might be associated with changes in brain function is consistent with research on the brain effects of hypnosis. The authors report a case of psycho-physiologic differences among 4 alter personalities manifested by a 35-year-old woman with DID. Differences in visual acuity, frequency of pendular nystagmus, and handedness were observed in this patient both when the alter personalities appeared spontaneously and when elicited under hypnosis. The authors consider several diagnostic possibilities for these findings and discuss whether prevailing treatment recommendations for DID patients could possibly be modified to ameliorate such visual and neurologic symptoms.

Experimental production of past-life memories in hypnosis

To explore the nature of past-life memories in hypnosis, 64 normal male adults aged 21 to 23 were selected using the Korean version of the Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility (HGSHS:K) and a simple belief in past-life scale. They all received hypnotic past-life regression 3 times. The influence of HGSHS:K scores on the production rate of past-life memories was statistically significant; however, the influence of belief was not. The percentage of subjects who responded to hypnotic past-life regression increased with hypnotizability. Content analysis showed that cultural background and religious concepts influenced past-life memory production. Animals as past-life identities, for example, were reported whereas all past-life identities were human in a Canadian study.

Remembrance of hypnosis past

The history of the most enduring experimental design in hypnosis research is reviewed. More than 75 years of research converge to indicate that: (1) all of the phenomena produced in hypnosis by suggestion also can be produced by suggestion without the induction of hypnosis, (2) the induction of hypnosis produces a relatively small increase in responsiveness to suggestion, and (3) hypnotic and waking suggestion are highly correlated, in many cases rivalling the reliability of the suggestibility measure. The importance of these data to both clinical and experimental hypnosis is emphasized.

In search of a deep psychobiology of hypnosis: visionary hypotheses for a new millennium

This search for the deep psychobiological foundations of hypnosis begins with a review of some of the paradoxes of historical hypnosis and the impasse of current theory. It is proposed that further progress requires a deeper investigation of how psychosocial cues can modulate the mechanisms of healing at the CNS, autonomic, neuroendocrine and cellular-genetic levels. The dynamics of hypnotic communication and healing from the cognitive-behavior level to the cellular-genetic are outlined in four stages: (1) Information transduction between the experiences of consciousness and the limbic-hypothalamic-pituitary system; (2) The psychosomatic network of messenger molecules and their receptors; (3) The immediate early gene protein cascade; and (4) State dependent memory, learning and behavior. Neuroscience research is outlined for its contributions to a mathematical model of how a psychobiological approach to the therapeutic applications of hypnosis and the placebo response could facilitate neurogenesis in the human hippocampus and healing at the cellular-genetic-protein level throughout the body. A series of ten hypotheses is proposed as a guide for theory and research in therapeutic hypnosis utilizing DNA chip technology in the new millennium.

Setting the record straight (again)

Spiegel's (1998b) further misrepresentations of both social psychological theory and my own social cognitive theory of hypnosis are corrected. There are more points of agreement than differences between Spiegel's position and mine. We agree that (1) role enactment is not a complete explanation of hypnosis or of anything else, (2) people differ in motivations and expectancies, and these differences do not fully account for differences in response, (3) individual differences in response to suggestion are extremely important; indeed, the trait-like character of hypnotic suggestibility was a cornerstone of social psychological theory at its very inception (Sarbin, 1950), and (4) there are physiological differences between high and low suggestible individuals and within high suggestibles when responding to suggestion.