In this video I describe hypnotic induction and hypnotic suggestibility. Next I describe several applications where hypnosis has been shown to be effective (such as analgesia), as well as areas where it is not effective (accurately recalling “lost” memories). Finally I consider two theories of hypnosis, Role Theory and Ernest Hilgard’s Dissociation Theory.
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Video Transcript
Hi, I’m Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we’re going to talk about hypnosis. Now when you think of hypnosis you might think of stage demonstrations or things you’ve seen on TV or in movies where a hypnotist has total control over a person, right? They’ll obey the every command of the hypnotist and do all sorts of outrageous things. But this isn’t really what hypnosis is about and most of these kinds of demonstrations are staged.
So what are we talking about when we talk about hypnosis? What we’re referring to is a state of relaxation and this is a state where people show focused attention and increased imagination and the state is brought about through hypnotic induction. And so this is a process where a hypnotist guides a person, essentially helps them to enter this relaxed state, and once the person is in this state the hypnotist makes suggestions to the person and the person will respond to these suggestions because of this increased state of attention and imagination.
Now people will vary in how much they respond to these suggestions of the hypnotist and so this varied strength of response is referred to as a person’s hypnotic suggestibility. Some people are highly hypnotizable and this means that they respond very strongly. They get sort of absorbed in these suggestions of the hypnotist whereas other people don’t experience this. Now it’s important to note that when we talk about somebody who’s highly hypnotizable the idea of hypnotic suggestibility is not the same as gullibility. We’re not saying that you know some people just accept everything the hypnotist says without question and if you give people this negative connotation, you suggest that, you know, their ability to be hypnotized is about how gullible they are then suddenly their hypnotic suggestibility decreases, right?
Another important point is that even people who are highly hypnotizable retain a sense of will throughout the process of hypnosis. So anyone who’s hypnotized is still in control of their own behavior. Alright so a hypnotist can’t get people to do things that they wouldn’t otherwise do, alright? A hypnotist couldn’t get somebody to, you know, commit a crime or something just because they were under hypnosis. Ok, so what can hypnosis be used for? Well one of the most important uses for hypnosis is analgesia and this is just another way of saying pain reduction. So hypnosis can be effective for reducing pain and this means that it can be used for minor surgical procedures and dental work and minor injuries and things that. It can actually reduce the pain that people experience and it also can improve healing. So people can recover more quickly with the help of hypnotic suggestion.
Now this might remind you of the placebo effect that we talked about earlier, right? Where receiving a false treatment can still help people to get better. Now in this case, when I say that hypnosis might be related to the placebo effect, I’m not using that in a derogatory sense. I’m not saying that, you know, hypnosis is not creating any real effect. What I’m saying is that it might be another way of accessing this placebo effect, this sort of healing power that we have that’s based on belief and expectation. Hypnosis may be another way of getting access to that and using it to help people to recover. Now this means that hypnosis can be used for a number of problems and it’s particularly helpful for stress-related problems and this is most likely due to the idea that hypnosis involves entering this state of relaxation.
And so it can help teach people how to relax and so these stress-related problems that hypnosis can be used to effectively treat are things like skin problems like psoriasis, which is related with stress. We have asthma, here’s another stress-related problem. So stress can worsen the symptoms of asthma and hypnosis can help to reduce that and it can also be useful in helping obesity and reducing stress related to obesity. So I think I’ve mentioned in a previous video that there’s a relationship between obesity and stress. I think I talked about it in the relationship with sleep deprivation which increases stress but anyway hypnosis can be effectively used to help treat these problems. It’s less effective for things like addictions, so hypnosis is sometimes used for addiction to things like alcohol or nicotine but it doesn’t show the same effectiveness that it shows with these stress-related problems.
Now an important thing is that what hypnosis can’t be used for and this is gaining access to lost memories; recovering memories through hypnosis or finding repressed memories, alright? So this is not actually a proper use of hypnosis because the memories that are supposedly recalled are not necessarily accurate and what happens is false memories can be implanted because the suggestions of the hypnotist can cause people to think that they remember something when in fact it’s actually the result of the suggestion. So people may feel more confident in memories that they uncover from hypnosis, that doesn’t mean that these memories are accurate. So we have to be especially careful because it’s a dangerous combination. Because sometimes hypnosis has been used to supposedly recover memories that relate to crimes or to childhood abuse and these kinds of allegations are pretty serious and we want to make sure that the memories of them are accurate and they they’re not the result of suggestions from the hypnotist, even if the hypnotist isn’t aware that this is happening. So we shouldn’t trust memories recovered from hypnosis any more than we would trust any other kinds of memories and in fact maybe we could trust them even less.
There is one relationship with hypnosis and memory that I want to mention and this is the idea that a hypnotist can suggest to a person that they won’t remember much about the hypnotic session and this actually does work. This can reduce people’s memory of the session and this is called posthypnotic amnesia. A hypnotist actually can get people to forget some parts of the hypnotic recession if they are directed to do that. Ok, so those are some uses of hypnosis so now we’ll look at some theories. What’s going on with hypnosis? Well we have two theories that we’ll look at.
The first theory is the idea that hypnosis is not a separate state of consciousness. It suggests that people are just kind of playing along; the hypnotist is making suggestions and people are going along with them and you know maybe they’re imagining it a little more detail than they might otherwise, but that it’s not an altered state of consciousness. And so this is role theory of hypnosis. So the idea is that people are playing a role. They’re essentially acting out these suggestions and so the hypnotist is sort of like the director and the hypnotized subjects are playing this role and going along with it. Now one of the problems with this theory is that people can follow these suggestions of a hypnotist even when they don’t think that they’re being observed. So this would suggest if they were merely acting or just playing along, if they didn’t think anybody was observing them, then they probably wouldn’t continue to play along. But actually people do continue to follow the suggestions of a hypnotist even if they don’t think that they’re being observed. So this suggests that role theory isn’t a full explanation of what’s going on.
This brings us to another theory of hypnosis and this is called dissociation theory and this was proposed by Ernest Hilgard and Hilgard suggested that there’s a dissociation that occurs. Dissociation means a separation and so he thought of it as an altered state of consciousness and the idea was that people would separate their experience from their awareness. And the way that Hilgard demonstrated this was using pain because, as I said, hypnosis can effectively reduce pain. So what Hilgard did was he had people put their hands in ice water and this is painful. You kind of hold your hand in ice water. Now if you’re fishing around in a cooler or something it gets painful pretty quickly and so what Hilgard did was he had hypnotized subjects hold their hands in ice water and he asked them about the pain and he asked about the experience of the pain. And as you might expect people who were hypnotized experienced less pain, but when he asked people about their awareness of the pain he got different answers.
They said they were aware that holding their hand in the ice water was painful but they just weren’t feeling the pain. They weren’t experiencing it. So this sort of separation, this dissociation, is that the pain, you know, pain messages are there. There’s an awareness of the pain but the emotional response to that, the experience of pain, is what’s being reduced by hypnosis. And so this is what led Hilgard to propose this dissociation theory. And this would suggest that hypnosis is actually a different type of consciousness than your normal waking consciousness, right? In the next video we’ll look at another possible altered state of consciousness that’s quite similar to hypnosis and this comes from meditation. I hope you found this helpful, if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!
