Critically analyzes the current tendency to account for human behavior largely in terms of the situation in which it occurs. This trend in effect substitutes a more or less behavioristic account of personality for a severely-taxed trait conception. Although it is undoubtedly true that behavior is more situation-specific than trait theory had acknowledged, it is argued that situations are more person-specific than is commonly recognized. Metaphysical, psychological, and methodological assumptions and biases of situationism which have rendered it inattentive to the importance of the person in personality research are discussed. An interactionist account of personality is presented as an alternative to both a trait and a situationist position. (3 p ref)

No abstract

The Waterloo-Stanford Group C (WSGC) hypnotic susceptibility scale was developed as a substitute for the individually administered Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale, Form C (SHSS:C). A first investigation with WSGC reports normative data on 259 subjects, and the results indicate that it is comparable in most important respects to the norms of SHSS:C. A second investigation directly compared WSGC and SHSS:C in a counterbalanced design on 65 subjects, and the two scales correlated .85. It is argued that, when used as a follow-up to the Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility, Form A, WSGC provides a valid criterion of hypnotic ability.

An auditory hallucination shares with imaginal hearing the property of being self-generated and with real hearing the experience of the stimulus being an external one. To investigate where in the brain an auditory event is ''tagged'' as originating from the external world, we used positron emission tomography to identify neural sites activated by both real hearing and hallucinations but not by imaginal hearing. Regional cerebral blood f low was measured during hearing, imagining, and hallucinating in eight healthy, highly hypnotizable male subjects prescreened for their ability to hallucinate under hypnosis (hallucinators). Control subjects were six highly hypnotizable male volunteers who lacked the ability to hallucinate under hypnosis (nonhallucinators). A region in the right anterior cingulate (Brodmann area 32) was activated in the group of hallucinators when they heard an auditory stimulus and when they hallucinated hearing it but not when they merely imagined hearing it. The same experimental conditions did not yield this activation in the group of nonhallucinators. Inappropriate activation of the right anterior cingulate may lead self-generated thoughts to be experienced as external, producing spontaneous auditory hallucinations.