. In motivation instructions the subjects are told:

1) Your performance will depend on your willingness to try to imagine vividly and to experience those things that will be described to you.
2) Previous subjects have been able to imagine vividly and to have the experiences that were suggested to them when they put aside the idea that this is a silly or difficult thing to do.
3) If you try to imagine to the best of your ability, you will experience a number of interesting things and you will not be wasting either your own or the experimenter's time.

On 2002-08-28 11:03, Millard123 wrote:
Here is an excerpt from the book "They Call It Hypnosis" by Robert A. Baker:

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Barber, Spanos, and Chaves (1974) point out that response to suggestions can be easily obtained without any hypnotic induction at all. In fact, "task motivational instructions," actually work better than standardized induction procedures involving suggestions of relaxation, drowsiness, and sleep. In motivation instructions the subjects are told:

1) Your performance will depend on your willingness to try to imagine vividly and to experience those things that will be described to you.

2) Previous subjects have been able to imagine vividly and to have the experiences that were suggested to them when they put aside the idea that this is a silly or difficult thing to do.

3) If you try to imagine to the best of your ability, you will experience a number of interesting things and you will not be wasting either your own or the experimenter's time.

Through a series of experiments the authors found that there were eight separate variables which enhanced responsiveness to suggestions. They were:

1) Defining the situation as "hypnosis."

2) Removing fears and misconceptions about hypnosis.

3) Securing cooperation, i.e., making the subject want to comply or convincing the subject he couldn't resist.

4) Asking the subject to keep his eyes closed, i.e., removing visual distractions.

5) Suggesting relaxation, sleep, and hypnosis.

6) Elaborating and varying the wording and tone of suggestions.

7) Coupling suggestions with actual events to enhance suggestibility.

8) Preventing or reinterpreting subject failure to act in accordance with suggestions.

All of the above variables heighten or augment suggestibility because they give rise to positive attitudes, motivations, and expectancies toward responding to suggestions and to being hypnotized, which in turn give rise to a willingness to think and imagine along with whatever is being suggested.

By far the most impressive and convincing aspects of Barber's work has been a series of experiments over a period of a dozen years or more demonstrating that any human activity or behavior that has been attributed to hypnosis – particularly the unusual ones, such as anesthesia, hallucination, enhanced muscular performance, amnesia, posthypnotic effects, unusual perceptual effects such as deafness, blindness, colorblindness, etc., and physiological effects such as heart acceleration, curing warts, pain suppression, etc. can be brought about in the normal waking subject without hypnosis just by direct suggestion. As Barber notes, thousands of books, movies, and magazine articles have woven the concept of "hypnotic trance" into the mainstream of common knowledge. Yet there is almost no scientific support for this concept. Since Mesmer's day it has been assumed the hypnotic trance state is real, i.e., that there is some reliable way to tell whether or not a person is hypnotized, some simple physiological measure such as brain waves, eye movements, pulse rate, etc. Yet no such physiological test exists, no way we can distinguish a hypnotized individual from an awake one. As Barber says, the notion of the hypnotic state is circular, i.e., state theorists say that a person obeys suggestions because he is in a hypnotic state. How do you know he is in a hypnotic state? Well, "because he obeys the suggestions."

The only reasonable challenges to Sarbin's and Barber's contentions have come from those state theorists who argue that hypnotized subjects are able to do things they would not or could not do while awake. It's hard to imagine that anyone could maintain his role playing or even a high level of motivation while undergoing major surgery. Both clinical and experimental evidence clearly shows that the hypnotic induction procedure followed by suggestions for pain insensitivity is highly effective in diminishing reports of pain. Robert Sears, for example, found that people's reports of pain from a sharp point could be reduced by twenty two percent under hypnosis when compared with waking controls. This ability to go through an ordinarily painful experience without reporting pain is so extraordinary that some theorists have suggested this as a test for the presence of hypnosis. Because of the importance of analgesia and the problem of pain we will take up the subject again at length in a later chapter. Suffice it to say here that it is not hypnosis per se that reduces the pain but the effects of relaxation and anxiety reduction, and suggestion and distraction serve as the active agents.

Regarding the other unusual or bizarre things that people do in hypnotic situations, Barber shows how wide-awake individuals accomplish the same things with ease. A standard stunt that nearly all stage magicians perform is to hypnotize a member of the audience and make his body so rigid that he can be stretched out like a plank, with his head on one chair and his ankles on another. It is assumed, of course, that in the ordinary waking state no one could do this. This is not true at all. Kreskin has shown how anyone can do the same thing while wide awake by just holding the body tense. The stunt is capped by having another person remove his or her shoes and then stand on the suspended person's chest. In such a case, usually the person playing suspension bridge has his shoulders on one chair and his calves on another. This simple stunt has nothing whatsoever to do with hypnosis.

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Millard