28 identify two groups of mirror pain responders: sensory localisers (19%), who report a localised, sensory experience, and affective general responders (12%), who report a generalised and emotional vicarious pain experience. Around 2% of the population may be mirror touch synaesthetes 27. In mirror-sensory synaesthesia, visual stimuli elicit reports of tactile sensations (mirror touch synaesthesia) 24, 25 or pain (vicarious pain perception or mirror pain) 26.
These studies are intended as test cases which, because of commonality with phenomenological control effects, have the greatest likelihood of providing evidence consistent with the theory. As an initial test of predictions arising from this theory, we investigated mirror synaesthesia and the rubber hand illusion, candidate effects commonly used to study embodiment which, like hypnotic suggestion effects, involve striking and apparently involuntary experiential change. In short, perceived task requirements may drive real experience according to reliable trait differences in the ability to control phenomenology to meet expectancies (phenomenological control). Although this proposal is consistent with many theoretical accounts of hypnosis and has potentially wide-ranging implications 16, it has not yet been directly investigated. There is evidence that demand characteristics can drive experience in scientific experiments 19, 20, 21, 22, 23. Indeed, hypnosis developed from Mesmerism, an 18th century suggestion effect in which subjects responded to implicit suggestion in a non-hypnotic context with, for example, apparently involuntary convulsions 18. However, phenomenological control is not restricted to response to direct suggestion. 16 for detailed discussion of the concept of phenomenological control in response to imaginative suggestion.Īlthough hypnosis is not required for imaginative suggestion effects, with a few notable exceptions 17, scales which measure response to imaginative suggestion have focused on the hypnotic context, in which suggestion is generally direct and explicit. Because the term ‘imaginative suggestibility’ evokes unwarranted association with other forms of suggestibility, we here refer to context-general top-down effects on perception in response to imaginative suggestion as ‘phenomenological control’. So our position is not a minority one it is just accepting the current predominance of evidence and approach in the field of imaginative and hypnotic suggestion (but see Kirsch 15 for the counter proposal that response to imaginative suggestion is directly caused by expectancies). For example, in The Oxford Handbook of Hypnosis 14, all five chapters in the section on theoretical perspectives involve control as a key part of the theories described.
There is agreement among hypnosis researchers that response to imaginative suggestion involves top-down control. In sum, response to imaginative suggestion involves the top-down voluntary control of action and experience (which is experienced as involuntary) according to a stable trait ability, and hypnosis procedures are not necessary for successful responding hypnosis is just one context within which imaginative suggestion effects occur 13. Hypnosis can therefore be considered a particular context in which people engage context-general abilities to respond to imaginative suggestion (imaginative suggestibility) 11, 12. Indeed, hypnotic induction provides only a small boost in response (around 10%) compared to imaginative suggestion without induction 9, and this boost appears to be attributable to the word hypnosis 10. It has long been known that response to imaginative suggestion does not require hypnosis 8. Hypnotisability is a normally distributed and stable trait 7. Hypnotic responding is distinct from social compliance or social desirability, and is not attributable to mere compliance 5, 6. Such responding therefore requires the top-down control of perception to meet expectancies arising from imaginative suggestions 3, 4. Response to hypnotic suggestion requires the ability to experience a wide variety of imagined events as real 1 and to experience a sense of involuntariness over the response 2. Such experiences include visual, auditory, or tactile hallucinations, pain, amnesia, and apparently involuntary motor actions. Hypnotisability scales measure individual differences in the ability to generate experience in response to imaginative suggestion within a situation designated as hypnotic.
0 kommentar(er)
