The relation of hypnotizability and dissociation to everyday mentation: An experience-sampling study.

Abstract

Research has found that individuals varying in hypnotizability and dissociation respond differently to questionnaires and procedures geared to affect their state of consciousness, but their stream of consciousness in everyday life has not been investigated. We evaluated the everyday mentation of students (N ϭ 46) in a 2 (High vs. Low Hypnotizability) ϫ 2 (High vs. Low Dissociative) design through experience sampling with personal digital assistants (PDAs). The PDAs prompted volunteers randomly 8 times per day during 5 days and included questions about attention, type of mental activity, and mood, among others, which resulted in 5 factors: focus/absorption, daydreaming, negative affect, control/awareness, and detachment. High control/ awareness correlated with high focus/absorption, low negative affect, and low detachment. Detachment correlated also with daydreaming. As predicted, high dissociatives reported less control but more detachment and negative affect than low dissociatives. High hypnotizables (Highs) did not report more focus/absorption than low hypnotizables (Lows) but endorsed more daydreaming and negative affect. Highs reported more thoughts than Lows, and Lows reported more sensory impressions than Highs. Hypnotizability and dissociation also interacted: Low dissociatives/Lows reported less daydreaming than the others, and high dissociatives/Lows experienced less control than the other 3 groups combined. Participants reported less control/awareness during daydreaming, with high dissociatives/Highs showing a larger decrement than the others. Most mentations referred to thoughts or sensory impressions; the former were characterized by more negative affect than the latter. In general, individuals felt more dysphoric when their mentation was more detached or less focused or controlled than usual.

Anomalous experiences are more prevalent among highly suggestible individuals who are also highly dissociative

“…Hallucination-proneness among HDHS individuals may be further facilitated by the more general experience of having less control over mental content (Cardeña & Marcusson-Clavertz, 2016). Our results also corroborate the finding that anomalous experiences are more common in this group but expand upon this previous result through more rigorous screening of hypnotic suggestibility than previous studies and use of a more diverse array of measures, which suggest that the observed effect is not specific to a particular scale.…”

Nuances and Uncertainties Regarding Hypnotic Inductions: Toward a Theoretically Informed Praxis

“…The former study used a relaxation-based induction that did not mention hypnosis whereas the latter used a hand heaviness induction without mentioning relaxation (the two subtypes did not differ in relaxation across conditions), suggesting that these results are relatively robust and that some of the spontaneous responses to an induction may be restricted to, or elevated among, high dissociative highly suggestible individuals. Such effects may be related to other characteristics of this subgroup including elevated involuntariness (Terhune, Cardeña, & Lindgren, 2011c) and reduced attentional effort (King & Council, 1998) during hypnotic responding, as well as in their spontaneous experiences in daily life (Cardeña & Marcusson-Clavertz, 2016). These findings suggest that an induction elicits spontaneous changes in cognition and perception in highly suggestible individuals and that some of these effects are more pronounced in high dissociative highly suggestible individuals.…”

The Roles of Response Expectancies, Baseline Experiences, and Hypnotizability in Spontaneous Hypnotic Experiences

“…Cardeña and Spiegel (1991, p. 104) earlier stated that, "because of the diminished competition with other types of mental occurrences (including self-reflective appraisals), hypnotic suggestions entail greater salience, influence, and perceived involuntariness." Given their reported lower self-awareness, highs may be more likely to experience such involuntariness during hypnotic responding than the other groups (and hypnotizability likely interacts with dissociativity, see Cardeña & Marcusson-Clavertz, 2016). However, the lower self-awareness of highs was not predicted by us in advance and needs to be replicated.…”