This paper examines research on three hypnotic phenomena: suggested amnesia, suggested analgesia, and “trance logic.” For each case a social-psychological interpretation of hypnotic behavior as a voluntary response strategy is compared with the traditional special-process view that “good” hypnotic subjects have lost conscious control over suggestion-induced behavior. I conclude that it is inaccurate to describe hypnotically amnesic subjects as unable to recall the material they have been instructed to forget. Although amnesics present themselves as unable to remember, they in fact (...) retain control over retrieval processes and accommodate their recall (or lack of it) to the social demands of the test situation. Hypnotic suggestions of analgesia do not produce a dissociation of pain from phenomenal awareness. Nonhypnotic suggestions of analgesia and distractor tasks that deflect attention from the'noxious stimuli are as effective as hypnotic suggestions in producing reductions in reported pain. Moreover, when appropriately motivated, subjects low in hypnotic suggestibility report pain reductions as large as those reported by highly suggestible hypnotically analgesic subjects. Finally, the data fail to support the view that a tolerance for logical incongruity (i.e., trance logic) uniquely characterizes hypnotic responding. So-called trance-logic-governed responding appears to reflect the attempts of “good” subjects to meet implicit demands to report accurately what they experience. (shrink)

Converging data from different disciplines are showing the role of classical conditioning processes in the elaboration of human and animal behavior to be larger than previously supposed. Restricted views of classically conditioned responses as merely secretory, reflexive, or emotional are giving way to a broader conception that includes problem-solving, and other rule-governed behavior thought to be the exclusive province of either operant conditiońing or cognitive psychology. These new views have been accompanied by changes in the way conditioning is conducted and (...) evaluated. Data from a number of seemingly unrelated phenomena such as relapse to drug abuse by postaddicts, the placebo effect, and the immune response appear to involve classical conditioning processes. Classical conditioning, moreover, has been found to occur in simpler and simpler organisms and recently even demonstrated in brain slices and in utero. This target article will integrate the several research areas that have used the classical conditioning process as an explanatory model; it will challenge teleological interpretations of the classically conditioned CR and offer some basic principles for testing conditioning in diverse areas. (shrink)

In addition to the usual array of interesting papers and reviews, this issue of the JSE features a debate that I consider especially noteworthy. The topic of the debate is hypnosis and the participants in the dialogue are all recognized authorities on the subject. However, the backgrounds and perspectives of the participants are also quite different, and so the discussion of the issues is commendably broad and wide-ranging. I’ve often wondered whether JSE readers noticed and were puzzled by the fact (...) that hypnosis has received little (if any) attention in the pages of this Journal. It has certainly puzzled me. Granted, unlike some of the phenomena (or alleged phenomena) discussed in the JSE, the existence of hypnosis is not generally disputed. However, the process and nature of hypnosis, and the implications of hypnotic phenomena for our understanding of the mind, remain acknowledged mysteries. To be sure, a small number of researchers cling obdurately to the belief (associated perhaps most often with Nicholas Spanos) that hypnosis is nothing but social compliance or role-playing designed to please the hypnotist.1 But the transparent absurdity of that position becomes clear as soon as one considers some of the more dramatic hypnotic phenomena—for example, failing to register pain during major surgery (e.g., limb amputation, the removal of 100-lb scrotal tumors [yes, that’s right], and the removal of toenails by the roots), and also the prevention of well-known involuntary responses to other noxious stimuli, such as ammonia placed under the nose and needles inserted in the mucous membranes of the eyes. Clearly, the subjects in these cases aren’t simply complying with the wishes of the surgeon by (say) feigning a lack of pain. These are paradigm cases of genuine and profound—and poorly understood—altered states, and they’re quite different from the non-reactions to relatively mild pain (e.g., hands in ice water) considered by Spanos...... (shrink)