Enhancement of military pilot reliability by hypnosis and psychophysiological monitoring: preliminary inflight and simulator data.
Subjects were Royal New Zealand Air Force pilots and this investigator (N = 8). Skin conductance response (SCR) was measured during a localizer approach for both inflight and simulator phases of the study. SCR's were noted following all ground controller altitude and heading change instructions and for all pilot-initiated heading and altitude changes employed to comply with the localizer approach plate. Inflight SCR's following ground controller instructions were substantially greater than those related to pilot initiated responses to cockpit information. In the flight simulator phase, posthypnotic suggestions for increased vigilance performance were administered with counterbalancing for hypnosis-no-hypnosis order conditions. Cockpit instrument data was video taped. Posthypnotic instructions for enhanced vigilance performance were found to dramatically increase SCR's to cockpit based information and to significantly reduce heading and altitude error correction time.
D000337:Aerospace Medicine; D001143:Arousal / Q000502:physiology; D005712:Galvanic Skin Response; D006801:Humans; D006990:Hypnosis; D008991:Monitoring, Physiologic; D011930:Reaction Time / Q000502:physiology; D013404:Suggestion; D013647:Task Performance and Analysis