Inhibition in the emotional Hayling task: can hypnotic suggestion enhance cognitive control on a prepotent negative word?

ABSTRACT

Recent studies suggest that instrumental hypnosis is a useful experimental tool to investigate emotional and language processing effects. However, the capacity of hypnotic suggestions to intervene during the response inhibition of emotional words remains elusive. This study investigated whether hypnotic suggestion can improve the inhibition of prepotent negative word responses in an emotional Hayling sentence completion task. High-suggestible participants performed a computerised emotional Hayling task. They were first asked to select the appropriate words ending highly predictable sentences among two propositions (initiation part), and then to select the filler words that did not end the sentences correctly (inhibition part). Half of the expected final words had a negative emotional valence, while the other half was neutral. The task was performed in a control condition (without suggestion) and with a hypnotic suggestion to decrease emotional reactivity. The results revealed that hypnotic suggestion (compared to the control condition) hastened response times on negative final words in the inhibition part, showing that hypnotic suggestion can enhance cognitive control over prepotent negative word responses in a sentence completion task. We suggest that this modulation stems from a reduction in the emotional relevance of the final words caused by the hypnotic suggestion.

KEYWORDS:

• Hypnosis
• emotional words
• cognitive control
• inhibition
• emotional Hayling task

Acknowledgements

The authors are thankful to Hugo Borrachero for his help in the selection of the sentence materials, and to Emilie Dujardin for her help in the construction of the corpus of sentences.

Data availability statement

All the data and stimuli are openly available at the Open Science Framework: https://osf.io/8f9c3/?view_only=cbb04de80e344e2886026a11dfe18f66.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Funding

This work was supported by a doctoral grant from the Ministère de l'Enseignement Supérieur et de la Recherche Scientifique (MESR, 2019-NM-47) awarded to the first author. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, interpretation of the data or decision to publish. We report no conflict of interest.