5.6 - Hypnosis Flashcards
What is Posthypnotic Amnesia?
The failure to retrieve memories following hypnotic suggestions
What is Hypnotic Analgesia?
Reduction of pain through hypnosis in people who are susceptible to hypnosis
- PET scans show brain activation of hypnotic hallucination to be similar of real perception
What is “Hypnosis”?
A social interaction in which one person (the hypnotist) makes suggestions that lead to a change in another person’s (the subject’s) subjective experience of the world.
What type of people are the best candidates for Hypnosis?
People with active, vivid imaginations, or who are easily absorbed in activities such as watching a movie, are also somewhat more likely to be good candidates for hypnosis
How is hypnosis induced?
a hypnotist may ask the person to be hypnotized to sit quietly and focus on some item, such as a spot on the wall (or a swinging pocket watch), and then make suggestions to the person about what effects hypnosis will have
How does Hypnosis relate to Memory??
Some important research has found that only memories that were lost under hypnosis can be retrieved through hypnosis.
The false claim that hypnosis helps people to unearth memories that they are not able to retrieve in normal consciousness seems to have surfaced because hypnotized people often make up memories to satisfy the hypnotist’s suggestions
What is the Stroop task?
a classic psychological test in which a person is asked to name the colour of words on a page (appearing in ink that is red, blue, green, etc.). This is a simple task.
However, sometimes the words themselves are the names of colours—but are printed in a different colour of the ink. It turns out that people are significantly slower, and make more errors, when naming ink colours that don’t match the content of the word (e.g., when the word “green” is written in red ink) than if the content is neutral or congruent (e.g., if the word “desk” or “red” is written in red ink).
This effect is present no matter how hard we try. In an amazing result, the effect is completely eliminated when highly suggestible people are hypnotized and told to respond to all words the same way
