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Hypnosis, reporting bias, and suggested negative hallucinations
N P Spanos1, C A Burgess, P A Cross
1Carleton University, Ottawa, Ontario, Canada.
Journal of Abnormal Psychology
|February 1, 1992
Summary
Reporting bias significantly influences hypnotic negative hallucinations. Highly hypnotizable individuals showed biased loudness reduction reports, even without perceptual changes, impacting study findings.
Area of Science:
- Psychology
- Neuroscience
- Cognitive Science
Background:
- Hypnotic negative hallucinations involve subjects denying perceptions under hypnosis.
- Reporting bias, the tendency to respond in a certain way regardless of the stimulus, may affect these reports.
- Previous research has not fully disentangled perceptual changes from reporting bias in hypnosis.
Purpose of the Study:
- To investigate the role of reporting bias in hypnotic negative hallucinations.
- To differentiate between actual perceptual changes and response biases in hypnotic deafness and blindness.
Main Methods:
- Developed a paradigm to assess reporting bias independently of perceptual change.
- Experiment 1: Assessed hypnotic deafness and reporting bias for loudness.
- Experiment 2: Correlated hypnotic blindness reports with independent reporting bias scores.
Main Results:
- Highly hypnotizable subjects showed significant reporting bias in loudness reduction, mimicking hypnotic deafness.
- Reporting bias scores were comparable in magnitude to hypnotic deafness reports.
- Hypnotic blindness and deafness correlated, but this relationship disappeared when reporting bias was statistically controlled.
Conclusions:
- Reporting bias plays a substantial role in hypnotic negative hallucinations.
- Findings suggest that some reported hypnotic effects may be influenced by response biases rather than solely by altered perception.
- The study highlights the importance of accounting for reporting bias in hypnotic research.