Before describing the outstanding articles appearing in this issue I want to express our collective sadness about the loss of three beloved members of our Society, Helen Crawford, Thomas Wall, and Richard Garver. These individuals actually became legends in their own life time and will be missed by so many.
“Promoting Safety in Hypnosis: A Clinical Instrument for the Assessment of Alertness” by Hedy A. Howard describes and uses three vignettes to illustrate how, with the Howard Alertness Scale (HAS), subjects can gain awareness of their baseline levels of alertness, the ways that their trance states differ from their normal alert states, and measure their subjective perception of alertness after hypnosis. Howard emphasizes the importance of the HAS in promoting safety after hypnosis by comparing assessed levels of alertness that existed before and after hypnosis. Finally, Howard calls for research to help establish the scale’s reliability and construct validity.
There has been a general lack of attention or study regarding pre-induction communications, which precede clinical and experimental inductions, and the impact such framing may have on subsequent responsiveness and performance (clinical outcome) in hypnosis. Related to this fact, Steven Jay Lynn, Reed Maxwell, and Joseph P. Green examine various examples and definitions of the identified induction process in an attempt to obtain a comprehensive understanding of how it affects the nature of hypnotic responsiveness in a follow up to the American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis (AJCH) Special Issue on Induction. In “The Hypnotic Induction in the Broad Scheme of Hypnosis: A Sociocognitive Perspective,” they conclude among, other things, that from a sociocognitive perspective there is no “clear line of demarcation between pre-hypnotic information, the induction, suggestions, and other constituents of the hypnotic context.”
Another outstanding article, “On Suggestibility and Placebo: A Follow-Up Study,” by Michael Lifshitz, Eli O. Sheiner, Jay A. Olson, Rémi Thériault, and Amir Raz, reports the attempt to replicate a study in which they previously found a relationship between hypnotic suggestibility and subjective ratings of relaxation following the ingestion of a placebo sedative. However, the authors found that “personality predictors of placebo response may be unreliable.” They conclude, “that placebo responses involve multifaceted interactions between traits, expectancies, and contexts.” These findings will immediately appear congruent with what we observe in our clinical work and will be a warmly welcomed platform for future investigations.
It is a well-known concern that in some standardized scales of hypnosis susceptibility scoring procedures have difficulty parsing deliberate actions from involuntary responses. John C. Mohl and Meriel J. Schutkofsky evaluate some of the variables that influence deliberate responses to suggestions in “Volitional and Non-Volitional Responses to Hypnotic Suggestions: Predictors and Subjective Experience.” They present a solid review of the problem, as well as various explanations and commentaries that surround it. They set out to test five hypotheses by an analysis of data from two studies, seven years apart, with 390 total participants. They, then, looked at the participants scores on five instruments compared to their self-reports of deliberate positive responses on a classical and modified HGSHS:A, and scales for subjective experiences, rapport and motivation, phenomenology, and expectancy. In the final analysis, the perception of autonomy, the probably artificial dichotomy between involuntary and voluntary, the degree of admixture of the two extremes, and other factors obfuscate the results and the authors discuss the limitations of the study and a direction for future research.
“Hypnosis as a Valuable Tool for Surgical Procedures in the Oral and Maxillofacial Area” by Gil Montenegro, Luiza Alves, Ana Luiza Zaninotto, Denise Pinheiro Falcão, and Rivadávio Fernandes Batista de Amorim provides a case report demonstrating the value of using hypnosis in dentistry. The authors bypassed the use of anesthesia during a tooth replacement implant procedure and mitigated anxiety, bleeding, and pain throughout the surgery. It is the authors’ intent to help dentists transition to the use of hypnosis and the included images and referenced online videos will be of interest to all readers.
Anthony D. Kauders, has written “The Social Before Sociocognitive Theory: Explaining Hypnotic Suggestion in German-Speaking Europe, 1900–1960.” In this scholarly report he surveys six decades of literature and influence on the development of the social cognitive approach to hypnosis that has developed in Germany. This article represents important documentation that has been needed and has been lacking in the historical record.