The Effects of Spoken versus Written Recall on Suggested Amnesia in Hypnotic and Task-motivated Subjects

Abstract

Eighty moderate-to-high susceptible subjects were randomly assigned to one of four treatments in a 2 × 2 factorial design (hypnosis/task-motivation × spoken/written recall). Subjects were administered the learning-amnesia suggestion sequence employed .by Spanos and Bodorik (1977). Partially amnesic subjects who wrote their recall had continual visual access to the words they had already recalled. We hypothesized that the written words would serve as cues and facilitate further recall. Therefore, we predicted that subjects in the written recall condition would show less partial amnesia than those in the spoken recall condition. These results failed to confirm our prediction; subjects in the written and spoken recall conditions were equally likely to exhibit partial amnesia. However, previous findings replicated were: (a) hypnotic subjects showed more amnesia than task-motivated subjects; (b) partially amnesic subjects showed disorganized recall whereas full recall subjects did not; (c) nonrecall subjects obtained higher susceptibility scores than full recallers; and (d) hypnotic subjects rated themselves as more deeply hypnotized than task-motivated subjects.