Recent research in cognitive science has demonstrated that when people vividly imagine or visualize personal childhood events, their subjective con®dence increases in the probability that these visualized incidents actually occurred. This study seeks not only to replicate what has been called the imagination in¯ation eect in a sample of undergraduates and middleaged factory workers but also to identify individual dierence variables that could predict susceptibility to suggestibility. Drawing from Rotter's (1982) social learning theory and Benjamin's (1974) structural analysis of social behaviour (SASB) model for interpersonal behaviour, the two experiments reported test the extent to which locus of control for reinforcement, dissociability, and a hostile/self-controlling introject (self-concept) could predict the imagination in¯ation eect. Results indicate that: imagination in¯ation is a robust and replicable phenomenon with young adults, but did not occur in a non-college population; with undergraduates, both external locus of control and dissociability correlate in a positive, signi®cant, and predicted way with suggestibility; introject variables correlate signi®cantly with imagination in¯ation, but not in the predicted manner. Findings are discussed in terms of helping psychologists better understand potential iatrogenic processes in psychotherapy.

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A survey has been undertaken of the various complications of halo-pelvic distraction in 118 patients with scoliosis prior to spinal fusion. In the first sixty-two patients the standard solid distraction rods were employed. The neurological complications included ten cases of cranial nerve lesions and two cases of paraplegia, one of them permanent. Springs were then incorporated in the distraction rods so as to allow direct readings ofthe distraction forces, and a total force of 18 kilograms was not exceeded in the last fifty-six patients. No further serious neurological complications occurred, but the amount of correction achieved in the adolescent and juvenile idiopathic types of scoliosis was reduced.

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