Enhancing Suggestibility: The Effects of Compliance vs. Imagery

Abstract

For more than 30 years, studies based on a social-learning, cognitive skillmodel of hypnotic responsiveness have documented appreciable increases on behavioraland subjective measures of susceptibility following hypnotizability modification training(Diamond, l972; Gfeller, Lynn, & Pribble, l987; Kinney & Sachs, l974; Sachs & Anderson,l967; Springer, Sachs, & Morrow, l977). By far the most impressive demonstration oftraining-related increments has come from a body of studies conducted by Spanos andhis associates (see Spanos, l986, for a review). In more than fifteen studies (see Gorassini& Spanos, 1999; Spanos, l991; Spanos, Lush, & Gwynn, l989), Spanos has shown thatbetween 50% and 80% of initially low-hypnotizable subjects who underwent a multi-faceted cognitive skill training program (termed herein Carleton Skills Training Program,CSTP) scored as high hypnotizables at posttesting. The CSTP provides participantswith accurate information about hypnosis, and uses direct instruction and observationof a videotaped model to teach participants to: (a) physically enact responses, asopposed to waiting passively for the suggested effects to happen to them (Spanos etal., 1986), and (b) use a variety of cognitive and imaginal strategies to facilitate respondingto suggestions including goal-directed imagery or fantasies (GDF’s; e.g., imagining ahand rising in response to a helium balloon attached to the wrist) to experience thesuggestion-related response as involuntary.What is particularly impressive is that treatment effects have been of largemagnitude, persist for an average of two and a half years after training (Spanos, Cross,Menary, & Smith, l988), and generalize to novel, demanding test suggestions (e.g., see