The tripartite classification of mental activities into cognition, affection, and conation originated in the German faculty psychology of the eighteenth century, but was adopted by the association psychologists of the nineteenth century of Scotland, England, and America. Its influence extended into the twentieth century through the writings of William McDougall. It is proposed that the classificatory scheme is still useful in the assessment of contemporary emphases in psychology, such as the present prominence of cognitive psychology to the relative neglect of affection and conation.
Conducted a longitudinal study of hypnotizability, as measured by the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale, Form A, that yielded a relatively high degree of stability in hypnotic responsiveness over repeated testings spanning a 25-year period. The 50 Ss were retested in 1985, after tests when they were students, between 1958-1962 and again in 1970. The statistically significant stability coefficients were .64 (10-year retest), .82 (15-year retest), and .71 (25-year retest). The means did not change significantly, and the median change in the scores of individuals was only 1 point on the 12-item scale. A set of score measures and their intercorrelations are insufficient to resolve the issue of why stability occurs. The stability of hypnotizability over time compares favorably with that of other measures of individual differences.In this article, we examine the degree of stability of scores on the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale, Form A (SHSS:A; Weitzenhoffer & Hilgard, 1959) over a 25-year period. The study began in the fall of 1957 when the Stanford Laboratory of Hypnosis Research began the first phase of collaborative research examining individual differences in measured hypnotic susceptibility (E. R. Hilgard, 1965). The data on the relative stability of scores on a standardized hypnotic responsiveness scale, in this case over a period spanning a quarter of a century, bear importantly on varied investigations designed to understand hypnotic processes.
Domain of Hypnosis and Scale ConstructionTests attempting to measure hypnotizability appraise what has been variously called suggestibility, susceptibility, or hypnotic responsiveness. All of these descriptors can be considered synonyms of a person's measured talent or ability to produce behaviors and experiences falling within the complex domain of hypnosis (E. R. Hilgard, 1973).The construction of a scale for the measurement of hypnotic responsiveness begins by selecting types of behavior and experiences characteristic of hypnosis. The items representing these types of experiences are then tried out on a large number of people inexperienced with hypnosis. Following an attempted induction of hypnosis by some standard method, the person is tested by being given the opportunity to respond to the various suggestions as a hypnotized person would. The test is but a sample of the broad range of possible hypnotic behaviors and expePortions of the results were presented in
2 experiments are reported to test the increase of responsiveness to suggestion tests following hypnotic induction over responsiveness to such tests in waking and imagination conditions, an increase that has been doubted as a result of experiments by Barber and Calverley (1962, 1963). In the 1st experiment, 60 Ss were divided into groups of 20 Ss each serving under 1 of 3 conditions in a 1st session (waking, imagination, hypnosis). All received a standard hypnotic induction in a 2nd session. While the treatment effects did not yield significant differences on the 1st day, there were significant gains in responsiveness to suggestions by the waking and imagination groups in the 2nd session. In the 2nd experiment, with some methodological improvements, 90 Ss served in 6 groups of IS Ss each, in imagination without expectation of hypnosis, imagination with expectation of hypnosis, and hypnotic induction, in various combinations. Significant gains were found with hypnotic induction throughout. State reports (subjective responses of drifting into hypnosis) showed that those Ss within both imagination and hypnotic induction conditions who reported themselves as becoming hypnotized were the ones who yielded the highest suggestibility scores. The difficulty of obtaining significant treatment effects is noted unless Ss serve as their own controls.
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