Correlates of Hypnotic Ability Flashcards
Which variables were found to have no relationship to hypnotizability?
Traditional personality measures, Intelligence, gender, age (past teenage years), race, Acquiescence (compliance), gullibility, social desirability
What variables have a small to medium correlation?
Measures of attention, perception and cognitive styles
What kind of cognitive style is related to hypnotizability?
Absorption - open to absorbing and self-altering experience.
Imagery and image thinking (necessary but not sufficient)
Fantasy proneness
Paranormal experiences
Dream control
Dissociation
What explains the limitations (mixed results) to the relationship between absorption and hypnotizability?
Demand Hypothesis – demands of experimental context affects response to scale
Construct Ambiguity Hypothesis – scale questions subject to different interpretations, intensity (related) versus frequency (unrelated).
High Hypnotizability seems related but not lower levels – won’t see unless create groups (high, mid, low)
What are cognitive shifts?
Attentional systems: alert, orient, and select
Alerting refers to a change in a person’s internal state in preparation for perceiving a stimulus.
Orienting directs the person’s point of reference to sensory objects,
Selecting involves choosing among conflicting actions
What area of the brain has been related to hypnotizability?
The volume of the rostrum of the corpus callosum.
What is automaticity?
A cognitive shift ability; attentional processes that are fast and require minimal attentional resources
What have researchers observed about the attentional processes of highly hypnotizable people?
Greater Stroop interference with priming
Faster processing at the level of frontal lobes (ERPs)
Superior performance on explicit memory tasks
Lower working memory capacity and process
Greater optimizing of attentional strategies (automaticity)
More vulnerability to memory distortions and memory creations
What variables of socio-cognitive shift correlate positively with hypnosis?
Beliefs
Expectations
Motivation
Attitudes
How do cognitive and socio-cognitive factors interact in everyday life?
certain psycho-pathologies e.g., phobias
creativity
What do current gene studies suggest about hypnosis?
Related (twins studies)
Catechol-O-methyl-transferase (COMT) gene relates to hypnotizability through its role in executive functions
Alleles – Valine/Methionine polymorphic gene
What is the drawback of automaticity?
It also implies a significant deviation in baseline efficiency of the executive attention network in highly hypnotizable people by increasing errors of attention.
