History of research centers and professional hypnosis societies in the United States.

The brief history of hypnosis in America begins with William James's chapter in his Principles of Psychology that got hypnosis off to a good start as a legitimate part of psychology. In the 20th century, before World War II, the idea of performing scientific investigations of hypnosis took place at Harvard University through William McDougall, at the University of Wisconsin and Yale University under Clark Hull, and, in its clinical aspects particularly, through the personal efforts of Milton H. Erickson. The resurgence after World War II is related to the use of hypnosis with war casualties during the war and with the development of clinical psychology. The aspects of the history emphasized here are the founding of continuing institutes and research centers, some theoretical cleavages that have persisted to this day, and the establishment of hypnosis societies with their journals, annual meetings, and workshops, including an International Society of Hypnosis. The history of Division 30 within the American Psychological Association brings the story up to date.

On the degree of stability of measured hypnotizability over a 25-year period.

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.

Review of B. F. Skinner's The Behavior of Organisms.

As I reread my review nearly 50 years later, I think of the circumstances. I had heard a paper by Fred at the Ithaca meeting of the APA in 1932, and recall the praise by Edna Heidbreder, who was sitting next to me, whose remark was that "He has a clean mind." The year before his book appeared, I had already cited eight of his published papers in a review of the conditioned response in relation to conventional learning experiments that appeared in the Psychological Bulletin (1937, 34, 61-102). It may be because of that the editor sent me Fred's book to review.When I received the copy of his new book to review, I read it carefully, and soon reported on it orally before Lewis Terman's weekly seminar to get comments and questions before revising my review. I was pleased by Terman's excitement over the originality of Fred's approach.

Illusion that the eye-roll sign is related to hypnotizability.

In Spiegel's Hypnotic Induction Profile (HIP), a scale for measuring hypnotic responsiveness, the claim has been made that the eye-role sign (ER) can predict hypnotizability usable in clinical practice with a success rate of 75%. Using data from thousands of clinical cases, the ER correlated .22 with other items within the HIP--not high enough for predictive purposes. The present analysis shows how clinical observations uncorrected by statistical analysis can lead to illusory interpretations.

Hypnotic deafness: a psychophysical study of responses to tone intensity as modified by hypnosis.

Hypnotic deafness was suggested for 1000 Hz tones presented in random orders at seven intensities between 17 and 70 db. Subjects were 70 college students stratified into four levels of hypnotic susceptibility, ranging from low to high. Four conditions were presented within a single session. Two conditions tested normal hearing, one in waking and one in hypnosis; two tested reported loudness of the tones as reduced by hypnotic suggestion. The method of magnitude estimation was employed. Hearing reduction was found to correlate .59 with hypnotic susceptibility in the total sample. Few high hypnotizables reduced their hearing to zero; their mean residual hearing during the deafness conditions was 55% of normal. Power functions for the relationship between tone intensity and magnitude estimates for conditions of normal hearing and deafness were found to be relatively parallel and orderly, differing primarily in intercept value. Order effect anomalies are discussed. The "hidden observer" method showed that for 4 of the 70 subjects the covert hearing was found to be at least 20% greater than that reported overtly within hypnotic deafness and approached normal hearing. As in our previous hypnotic analgesia research, not all subjects who reduced their hearing significantly gave subsequent covert reports which differed from reported overt hearing. Discussion is given for evidence of two levels of information processing during hypnotically suggested perceptual distortions.