Suggestion difficulty as a hypothesized moderator of the relation between absorption and suggestibility: A new spectral analysis

Abstract

Measures of hypnotic suggestibility and absorption were administered to 146 participants in the guise of different experiments. A spectral analysis was performed by correlating the difficulty of individual hypnotic suggestions with the magnitude of the association between suggestions and absorption. Contrary to the two-component model, absorption was not more highly correlated with passing difficult suggestions than easier suggestions. This was confirmed by a meta-analysis of this and other spectral analysis studies. In addition, cross-study correlations revealed that the magnitude of the association between absorption and individual suggestions is highly variable, rendering the two-component model very difficult to test. These findings indicate that discrepant results in previous spectral analyses may have been due to low reliability of associations with individual scale items, as well as the relatively small number of correlations that constitute the raw data of these analyses.