Enhancing thought suppression with hypnosis

Elucidating unconscious processing with instrumental hypnosis

Most researchers leverage bottom-up suppression to unlock the underlying mechanisms of unconscious processing. However, a top-down approach - for example via hypnotic suggestion - paves the road to experimental innovation and complementary data that afford new scientific insights concerning attention and the unconscious. Drawing from a reliable taxonomy that differentiates subliminal and preconscious processing, we outline how an experimental trajectory that champions top-down suppression techniques, such as those practiced in hypnosis, is uniquely poised to further contextualize and refine our scientific understanding of unconscious processing. Examining subliminal and preconscious methods, we demonstrate how instrumental hypnosis provides a reliable adjunct that supplements contemporary approaches. Specifically, we provide an integrative synthesis of the advantages and shortcomings that accompany a top-down approach to probe the unconscious mind. Our account provides a larger framework for complementing the results from core studies involving prevailing subliminal and preconscious techniques.

Furnishing hypnotic instructions with implementation intentions enhances hypnotic responsiveness

Forming implementation intentions has been consistently shown to be a powerful self-regulatory strategy. As the self-regulation of thoughts is important for the experience of involuntariness in the hypnotic context, investigating the effectiveness of implementation intentions on the suppression of thoughts was the focus of the present study. Participants were randomly assigned to one of four conditions (hypnotic instruction plus implementation intention, hypnotic instruction, implementation intention, and control condition). Results showed that participants who received information included in the "Carleton Skill Training Program" and in addition formed implementation intentions improved their hypnotic responsiveness as compared to all of the other three groups on measures of objective responding and involuntary responding. Thus, in line with the nonstate or cognitive social-psychological view of hypnosis stating that an individual's hypnotic suggestibility is not dispositional but modifiable, our results suggest that hypnotic responsiveness can be heightened by furnishing hypnotic instructions with ad hoc implementation intentions.

Neurophysiological attributes of the hypnotic state and the utility of hypnosis in pediatric medicine and burn care

Three articles of special interest to the hypnosis community recently appeared in the general scientific and medical literatures. The first paper is a thoughtful review of the clinical applications of hypnosis in pediatric settings. The second article reports the findings of a randomized, controlled trial of hypnosis for burn-wound care, carried out at the University of Washington Medical School. The third article describes an innovative EEG laboratory case study tracking the cortex functional connectivity of a highly hypnotizable subject across various baseline and experimental conditions. These three articles are sturdy examples of how hypnosis illuminates (and is illuminated by) medical and psychological science.

Hypnosis and thought suppression - more data: a brief communication

This study hypothesized that hypnosis would enhance thought suppression by minimizing the effect of cognitive load. Twenty-eight high and 29 low hypnotizable hypnotized participants received the cognitive load of learning a 6-digit number. Participants then received either a suppression instruction or no instruction for a personal memory of a failure experience. Thought-suppression effectiveness was indexed by measures of self-report monitoring, competition of scrambled sentences, and facial electromyography. Low hypnotizable participants who received the suppression instruction displayed postsuppression rebound on the sentence-unscrambling task. In contrast, high hypnotizable participants did not display any rebound effects. These findings support the proposition that hypnosis facilitates thought suppression.

Salient findings: hypnotizability as core construct and the clinical utility of hypnosis

Six papers of special interest to the hypnosis community have recently appeared in the general scientific literatures. Three of these papers were published as part of the 2006 Cochrane Collaboration on the utility of medical interventions. These reviews analyze the research literature on the efficacy of hypnosis for treatment of needle-related pain in children, pain management during childbirth, and conversion disorder. Hypnosis is the most promising psychological intervention studied for needle-related procedural pain and distress in children and adolescents; it is effective as an adjunctive analgesic during childbirth; and it is of uncertain usefulness in treatment of conversion disorder. A second cluster of three studies unambiguously demonstrates the central role of hypnotizability as a predictor of responsiveness in laboratory, analogue treatment, and medical practice settings. One of these articles may well be the most important hypnosis paper in many years.