Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale: Fill & Download for Free

STANFORD HYPNOTIC SUSCEPTIBILITY SCALE Page on berkeley.edu

Whether you realise it or not, your core question is epistemological. Is there any irrefutable way to prove that anything works? What sorts of evidence are you willing to accept, and what forms of evidence are unacceptable? Personally, I lean towards empiricism and a hypothetico-deductive approach. I believe that there’s always a chance that new information will force us to revise what we think we know, and that that’s a good thing. If your model of how we can create knowledge differs, feel free to clarify so I can try to address it from within your philosophical worldview.The next question, of course, is what it would mean for hypnosis to “work”. I would propose an interim definition here that says hypnosis “works” if a hypothesis based on the idea of hypnosis appears to be correct when tested. For example, the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale, Form C, has 12 test items. Feel free to follow the link to see exactly how each is presented.If hypnosis does not work at all, we might expect everybody taking this test to show no response to suggestion on any of the thirteen points. Instead, what we see in an American sample (there is some slight variation internationally) is:Hand lowering: 92% lowered their hand 6″ or more within ten secondsMoving hands apart: 88% found their hands more than 6″ apart at the end of ten secondsMosquito hallucination: 48% displayed any grimacing, any movement, or any other acknowledgment of effect.Taste hallucination: 46% reported experiencing both sweet and sour tastes, and reported either one as strong, or one was accompanied by overt signs such as lip movements or grimacingArm rigidity: 45% were able to bend their arms less than 2″ in the ten second interval.Dream: 44% had an experience comparable to a dream -- not just vague, fleeting experiences, or thoughts or feelings without accompanying imagery.Age regression: 43% responded to a suggestion that they go back and experience being younger, in elementary school.Arm immobilization: 36% were unable to lift their arms at least one inch in a ten second period.Anosmia: 27% were unable to smell undiluted peppermint oil held directly under their nosesHallucinated voice: 19% responded realistically to questions from an imaginary voice only they could hear.Negative visual hallucination: 9% could only see two boxes when three were placed in front of them.Posthypnotic amnesia: 27% could not remember what had happened while hypnotised until the experimenter gave permission to remember.Does this prove that hypnosis works, albeit to different extents with different people? Maybe. On the other hand, maybe the subjects were just nice people who went along with what they thought the researchers wanted, which is called complying with demand characteristics of a study. Maybe the effects worked because the lab setting made them think it would work, called the placebo effect. Maybe the experimenters saw more effect than was actually displayed, because the experimenters expected it. These aren’t refutations, per se, but they are plausible alternative explanations for some or all of the variation, and we can’t say whether or how much effect they had. This is why SHSS isn’t meant to prove hypnosis, but just to compare individuals’ responses with one another.For a better test, we need to compare people who are hypnotised with a control group. Ideally, the control group would be people who think they are hypnotised, and whom the experimenters think are hypnotised, but who actually aren’t. My favourite study for that purpose, because of the brilliant way the authors built the control group, was by Thomas H McGlashan, back in 1969.This particular study also appeals to me because the work it’s asking hypnosis to do is pain relief. To me, this seems like more significant work than sticking somebody’s hand to a table.The control group was 12 young men who had tested on the SHSS and another test as being very unaffected by hypnosis. They were told that a new hypnosis method had been developed that would affect them, and this was proven by having them experience discomfort before hypnosis, and then providing a lower level of the uncomfortable stimulus “in hypnosis” to convince them that it would, in fact, work for them. The experimenters were not told who was whom.All subjects were given a chance to perform a water-pumping task while the amount of pain to which they were subjected increased. In a second session, they did the same task under a hypnotic suggestion for pain relief. Another day, they were given a placebo pill and asked to perform the task again. With the placebo pill, they pumped for an insignificantly longer period of time and displaced a significantly larger amount of water; there was no significant difference in placebo response between the susceptible and insusceptible groups.When the subjects were tested under hypnosis — the same induction, from experimenters who did not know whether or not each subject was susceptible to hypnosis — the insusceptible subjects performed about as well as they did with the placebo pill. This demonstrates that hypnotic effects can be partly attributed to the placebo effect. The highly susceptible individuals, however, reported much less pain than they had with the placebo pill, and much less pain than the insusceptible subjects did. Insusceptible subjects and susceptible ones pumped approximately the same amount of water, both reaching a physical limit of muscular exhaustion, but the highly susceptible subjects pumped for significantly longer, and indicated that pain was not what was preventing them from continuing.This being science, another study that refuted the results of this one would be welcomed. None has appeared, to my knowledge. It’s not irrefutable evidence — good science never is — but I consider it strong and persuasive. What do you think?Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale: http://socrates.berkeley.edu/~kihlstrm/PDFfiles/Hypnotizability/SHSSC%20Script.pdfNorms for SHSS: Standardization of the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale, Form C in a Mexican SampleMcGlashan study: The Nature of Hypnotic Analgesia and Placebo Response to Experimental Pain

Hii :) when I was doing my masters in psychology, I used to work on a project related to hypnosis and synaesthesia...as a part of the project I used to screen around 10-15 students everyday for hypnotic susceptibility using a group hypnosis scale (Waterloo-Stanford). Among those 300 odd samples that I screened, hardly 7-10% were susceptible to hypnosis. But in the answer scale, most people used to say that they were hypnotized...although it was evident that most of them weren't...it is still difficult in a way to differentiate who is still susceptible and who isn't, other than the responses. As my prof used to say, getting hypnotized by someone else in itself yields results like this, self-hypnosis might be more complicated...bottom line, it always depends on your mind mechanism...how susceptible you are to those suggestions...how susceptible you can be to those suggestions...it is not about being weak or vulnerable, considering that hypnosis is just an alternative state of consciousness like sleep or meditation, it is about how allow yourself into that state. :) Mind indeed is magical!! Not sure if my answer helped you...but these are just excerpts from the research :)