This research project is concerned with personality and cognitive processes implicated in hypnosis and related states. The goal is to explore the application of hypnosis as laboratory model for somatoform and dissociative psychopathology, and as a paradigm for the understanding of clinically relevant nonconscious mental processes, and to lay the scientific basis for the appropriate and effective use of hypnosis as an adjunctive treatment in medicine and psychotherapy. Throughout the research, hypnosis is studied from the perspective of information-processing approaches to perception, memory, and cognition. Although the research is focused mainly on hypnosis, studies of other cognitive, social, and personality processes will be conducted, as needed, in order to develop experimental procedures or to clarify the nature of the mechanisms underlying hypnotic phenomena. A total of five major lines of research are proposed: (1) assessment of hypnotic response in oneself and others(2) relations between individual differences in hypnotizability and other features of personality and cognitive functioning; (3) memory processes disrupted during posthypnotic amnesia and related phenomena; (4) the nature of posthypnotic suggestion; and (5) perceptual-cognitive processes involved in response to suggestions for anesthesia. Although no studies of patient populations are explicitly planned, the laboratory will seek the opportunity to conduct collaborative research on such matters as the comparative hypnotizability of patients differing in diagnostic category or age, and the efficacy of hypnosis as an adjunct to traditional forms of insight-oriented and cognitive-behavioral psychotherapy. The core of the proposal is the advancement of our understanding of hypnosis itself through laboratory research employing established paradigms in cognitive and personality psychology.
| Tataryn, Douglas J; Kihlstrom, John F (2017) Hypnotic Tactile Anesthesia: Psychophysical and Signal-Detection Analyses. Int J Clin Exp Hypn 65:133-161 |
| Kihlstrom, John F (2015) Patterns of hypnotic response, revisited. Conscious Cogn 38:99-106 |
| Kihlstrom, John F; Glisky, Martha L; McGovern, Susan et al. (2013) Hypnosis in the right hemisphere. Cortex 49:393-9 |
| Kihlstrom, John F (2013) Neuro-hypnotism: prospects for hypnosis and neuroscience. Cortex 49:365-74 |
| Tobis, Irene P; Kihlstrom, John F (2010) Allocation of attentional resources in posthypnotic suggestion. Int J Clin Exp Hypn 58:367-82 |
| Park, Lillian; Shobe, Katharine K; Kihlstrom, John F (2005) Associative and categorical relations in the associative memory illusion. Psychol Sci 16:792-7 |
| Wenk-Sormaz, Heidi (2005) Meditation can reduce habitual responding. Altern Ther Health Med 11:42-58 |
| Kihlstrom, John F (2003) The fox, the hedgehog, and hypnosis. Int J Clin Exp Hypn 51:166-89 |
| Kihlstrom, John F (2002) Mesmer, the Franklin Commission, and hypnosis: a counterfactual essay. Int J Clin Exp Hypn 50:407-19 |
| Kihlstrom, J F; Cantor Kihlstrom, L (2001) Somatization as illness behavior. Adv Mind Body Med 17:240-3; discussion 270-6 |
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