Lack of correlation between hypnotic susceptibility and various components of attention.

The purpose of our study was to measure the relationship between performance on various attentional tasks and hypnotic susceptibility. Healthy volunteers (N=116) participated in a study, where they had to perform several tasks measuring various attention components in a waking state: sustained attention, selective or focused attention, divided attention and executive attention in task switching. Hypnotic susceptibility was measured in a separate setting by the Waterloo-Stanford Groups Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility, Form C (WSGC). We found no significant correlation between any of the attentional measures and hypnotic susceptibility. Highly hypnotizables did not prove to be superior to or worse than the other individuals in any of the tests. These results do not support the neuropsychophysiological model of hypnosis, as they show no consistent relationship between hypnotic susceptibility and waking attentional performance.

Copyright © 2011 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Conscious Cogn. 2011 Dec;20(4):1872-81. Epub 2011 Oct 2. Varga K, Németh Z, Szekely A. Institute of Psychology, Eötvös Loránd University, Izabella utca 46. Pf. 755, Budapest H-1384, Hungary. varga.katalin@ppk.elte.hu