Short CommunicationFurnishing hypnotic instructions with implementation intentions enhances hypnotic responsiveness
Highlights
► Implementation intentions are effective self-regulatory tools. ► We examine thought suppression by implementation intentions in the hypnotic context. ► A combined intervention improved objective and subjective responses. ► Hypnotic suggestibility can be enhanced by instructions and implementation intentions.
Introduction
What differentiates highly hypnotizable people from less hypnotizable individuals? In her review on brain dynamics associated with hypnosis, Crawford (1994) reports that highly hypnotizable persons have greater attentional abilities and thus are better able to focus and sustain their attention than low hypnotizable individuals. Highly hypnotizable participants are also reported to be more able to ignore distracting, irrelevant stimuli. On the other hand, training low hypnotizable subjects in direct management strategies (e.g., creating perceptual experiences) has been found to increase their hypnotic responsiveness, even up to the level of high-scoring participants (Gorassini, 2002).
The opposing results that hypnotizability is a stable ability, on the one hand, and that it can be modified, on the other hand, may be explained by different theoretical approaches. In fact, hypnotic theories have been traditionally dichotomized into two broad distinctive frameworks: the so-called state or special-process view (e.g., Bowers, 1992), and the nonstate or cognitive social–psychological view (see, for example, Spanos, 1986). Both perspectives have traditionally differed in their explanations of hypnotizability: while the state view considers hypnotizability as being a relatively stable personality trait, it has been claimed by nonstate theorists that given sufficient training, most people can become more hypnotizable. For example, Gorassini (2004) concludes in his review on the enhancement of hypnotizability that hypnotic responsiveness is highly modifiable and this may be achieved by a variety of techniques. Moreover, Kirsch and Lynn (1995) point out that the central issues dividing the field, such as whether hypnosis is an altered state of consciousness, can be best understood as points on a continuum.
Attentional processes are major determinants of a person’s hypnotizability (e.g., Kirsch & Lynn, 1998). In fact, the importance of attentional processes for the hypnotic experience has been highlighted both theoretically and empirically. As the hypnotic experience requires that attention be directed to the task at hand while alternate thoughts are ignored, thought suppression has been specifically pointed to as central to the hypnotic experience. For example, Barrios (2001) suggests, based on principles of conditioning and inhibition, that responsiveness may be increased by inhibiting stimuli and thoughts that are incompatible with the received suggestions. In a recent theoretical development, Dienes and Perner (2007) argue in their cold control theory of hypnosis that successful responses to hypnotic suggestions require effective executive control without the involvement of higher order thoughts about intending. The theory states that the hypnotic experience can be obtained by forming an intention to perform the cognitive activity or respective action (e.g., “Lift the arm!”). However, these hypnotic suggestions need to be implemented without the presence of the usually accompanying second-order thoughts about intending the action (“I am intending to lift my arm”). Consequently, highly suggestible people differ in this respect from low suggestible individuals insofar as the former are able to avoid second order thoughts about intending and dissociate them from actual intentions.
The assumption that self-regulating thoughts and behavior are relevant to the hypnotic suggestibility of a person has also been backed up empirically by Brown and colleagues (2001), who found that asking participants to avoid thinking and to not question what they were asked to do and experience, did indeed increase their suggestibility over and above standard procedures. Notably, Wegner and Erskine (2003) specifically examined whether people can suppress their thoughts of their intention to perform simple tasks while they carry them out. They found that people who received the instruction to suppress their thoughts about their intended behavior were able to influence their own experience of actions and consequently reported reduced intentionality (i.e., they experienced involuntariness for their actions). Wegner and Erskine observed, however, that thought suppression had no stable effect over time and can even produce a rebound effect of the suppressed thoughts. In fact, thought suppression has been repeatedly observed to produce paradoxical effects. In two studies, for example, Wegner and colleagues (1987) found that participants given the instruction to suppress their thoughts about a white bear reported thinking about the bear more than once per minute. These findings have also been replicated in the hypnotic context: Bryant and Wimalaweera (2006) found that low-suggestible participants showed higher accessibility of suppressed thoughts after the suppression period than did high hypnotizable participants. The latter participants, in contrast, did not display this ironic effect of thought suppression.
Taken together, these findings point to the importance of effectively inhibiting thoughts in the hypnotic context. One way of ensuring thought suppression without cognitive costs is by forming implementation intentions. Implementation intentions (Gollwitzer, 1999) are if-then plans that spell out when, where, and how a set goal is to be put into action: “If situation x is encountered, then I will perform response y!”, thereby linking a critical situation with a goal-directed response. They are to be distinguished from goal intentions that merely specify a desired performance or outcome and have the format of: “I intend to reach z!” Goal intentions only designate desired end-states the individual wants to attain, while implementation intentions refer to the realization of the goal intention and create a commitment to respond to a specified critical situational cue in a planned, goal-directed manner. Implementation intentions are thus hierarchically subordinate to goal intentions; that is, they are formed in the service of attaining respective goal intentions. How do implementation intention effects come about? First, specifying the situational cue in the if-component of an implementation intention increases the cue’s mental accessibility (e.g., Parks-Stamm et al., 2007, Webb and Sheeran, 2007). This allows for easy detection, effective recall, and a readiness to attend to the critical situation even if one is otherwise cognitively busy. Second, a strong cue-behavior link is established by making if-then plans (Webb & Sheeran, 2008), so that the presence of the specified cue automatically elicits the linked response. The upshot of these strong links is that the initiation of the goal-directed response specified in the if-then plan becomes automated; that is, it exhibits features of automaticity including immediacy, efficiency, and redundancy of conscious intent.
In sum, implementation intentions originate from an act of will creating an associative link between a critical situational cue and the respective goal-directed response. By forming implementation intentions, a person can thus switch from the conscious, top-down control of goal striving to an automatic, bottom-up control of goal-directed behavior (Gollwitzer, Parks-Stamm, & Oettingen, 2009). Though implementation intentions do originate from a conscious intent, the control of the goal-directed action is handed over to the specified critical situational cue (Gollwitzer & Schaal, 1998).
The assumption that implementation intention effects on goal attainment are vested in the switch from conscious and effortful goal striving to automated self-regulation of goal striving has been supported by findings showing that forming implementation intentions helps in dealing effectively with cognitive load (Brandstätter, Lengfelder, & Gollwitzer, 2001), does not heavily tax self-control resources (e.g., Schweiger Gallo & Gollwitzer, 2007), and circumvents the conscious intent to act at the critical moment (Bayer et al., 2009, Sheeran et al., 2005). Further, beneficial effects of implementation intentions have also been shown for internal stimuli, such as the down-regulation of strong emotions (e.g., disgust, fear; Schweiger Gallo, Keil, Mc Culloch, Rockstroh, & Gollwitzer, 2009) and the shielding of a focal ongoing goal striving from disruptive inner states (e.g., moods, ego depletion, self-doubts; Bayer, Gollwitzer, & Achtziger, 2010). It is this latter research that supports our assumption that implementation intentions may also be effective in self-regulating thoughts in a hypnotic context.
Section snippets
The present research
In the present research, we tested whether furnishing hypnotic instructions with implementation intentions allows for particularly effective inhibition of higher-order thoughts, thereby increasing suggestibility as assessed by objective behavior and ratings of experienced involuntariness. As combined interventions of mental imagery and implementation intentions have been shown to lead to higher rates of goal achievement (Knäuper, Roseman, Johnson, & Krantz, 2009), we expected participants in
Participants
One-hundred sixty-five participants were invited to participate in this study. The final sample at the second wave of data collection (henceforth called T2) consisted of 152 participants (103 women) aged between 18 and 56 (M = 23.42, SD = 6.19).
Procedure
Data collection took place at a German university at two measurement times. In both sessions, the standardized procedure included self-explanatory questionnaires and hypnotic induction instructions that had previously been taped by an experimenter who was
Results
First, we divided participants on the basis of a median split of their objective responding score into low and high suggestible groups. Since the median was 7, those participants with a mean centrality rating of 8 and higher were identified as highly suggestible (see also for example, St. Jean, McInnis, Campbell-Mayne, & Swainson, 1994), the remaining 59% of the participants were classified as low suggestible. There were no significant differences between the variables of level of
Discussion
Laurence, Beaulieu-Prévost, and du Chéné (2008) state that with respect to hypnosis research “there are a number of promising lines of inquiry: first, the focus on attentional processes and, more specifically, on the acquisition of automaticity” (p. 248). The present research takes up this suggestion by analyzing the effects of hypnotic instructions and forming implementation intentions – plans which lead to strategic automaticity (Schweiger Gallo et al., 2009) – on thought suppression in the
Acknowledgments
The present studies were partially financed by the Ministerio de Ciencia e Innovación Grant I + D + i PSI2009-07066 to the first and third author, and by a DAAD fellowship to the first author.
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