Hypnosis and thought suppression - more data: a brief communication.
This study hypothesized that hypnosis would enhance thought suppression by minimizing the effect of cognitive load. Twenty-eight high and 29 low hypnotizable hypnotized participants received the cognitive load of learning a 6-digit number. Participants then received either a suppression instruction or no instruction for a personal memory of a failure experience. Thought-suppression effectiveness was indexed by measures of self-report monitoring, competition of scrambled sentences, and facial electromyography. Low hypnotizable participants who received the suppression instruction displayed postsuppression rebound on the sentence-unscrambling task. In contrast, high hypnotizable participants did not display any rebound effects. These findings support the proposition that hypnosis facilitates thought suppression.
University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia. r.bryant@unsw.edu.au
Richard A
RA
Bryant
Natasha
N
Sindicich
D000293:Adolescent; D005260:Female; D006801:Humans; D006990:Hypnosis; D008297:Male; D012094:Repression, Psychology; D011795:Surveys and Questionnaires; D013850:Thinking