Psychological researchers often administer more than one measure during the same research session in order to test hypothesized relationships among contructs. However, initial measures might influence subjects in ways that affect their responses to subsequent measures. Demonstrations of such "context effects" have important methodological implications, since correlations obtained in studies that fail to control for context effects may significantly differ from those obtained with proper controls. Three studies are proposed in order to demonstrate that the phenomenon is robust and should be of general concern in research on personality and individual differences. Two basic conditions will be employed: In the Same Context condition, measures will be administered together in one research session, so that subjects may infer an association. In the Separate Context condition, scales will be administered in separate sessions, as parts of independent studies. Thus, subjects will be unlikely to perceive any connection among them. Three established relationships will be investigated to determine whether relationships have been confounded by context effects: a) hypnotizability and absorption; b) depression and attributional style; and c) childhood traumata and adult personality. Professor Council is an internationally known scholar in the area of hypnosis research. His proposal to test for the presence of context effects in several different substantive areas is of considerable importance. Much work on personality, social psychology, and psychopathology consists of studying relationships between measures obtained from subjects on a single occasion. Thus, if context effects are shown to contribute significantly to relationships between measures, many well-known facts may turn out to be artifactual. Likewise, the experimental results may lead to a change in the methodologies customarily employed to collect information in these fields and may spur new theoretical investigations.
