Memory and Hypnosis

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Memory and Hypnosis
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Types of Memory Assessment

• Age regression
• Report experiences of remembered childhood
• Past lives
• Hypnotic hypermnesia
• Improved memory as a result of hypnosis
• Posthypnotic amnesia
• Failure to remember events during hypnosis

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Age Regression

• Reinstatement of sense of being a child
• Indicators
• Soft measures
• change in handwriting
• reports of vivid childhood experience
• Hard measures
• changes in physiological responses
• changes in cognitive processes
• changes in perceptual/affective processes

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Nash on Age Regression

• No evidence of reflexes of childhood, e.g.,
  Babinski reflex
• No evidence of Piagetian cognitive processing
• Evidence of some effects on transitional
  objects
• Suggested stressful situation leads to request
  for a transitional object
• Only the designated object will be acceptable

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Age Regression Social-cognitive view

• Subject imagines being childlike
• Reconstruction of childhood memories
• Emotional tone is aroused by memory

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Previous Lives

• Hypnotized subjects can recall prior lives
• Source of information is prior experience,
  knowledge, and imagination

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Hypnotic Hypermnesia

• Under hypnosis, people recall more information
  than without hypnosis
• Key issue is whether they recall more correct
  information
• Important points to consider
• People remember better with more fully developed
  retrieval cues
• People can be induced to falsely remember events
• Confidence is not a good guide for accuracy

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Dyan and Bowers (1983)

• 4 conditions
• High/low hypnotizables
• Hypnosis/task motivation
• 4 stages
• Input study 60 drawings of common objects
• Forced recall report 60 items, mark memory
• Repeated forced recalls for 1 week
• Final recall test

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Dylan and Bowers results

• Hypnotized highs reported more new memories than
  nonhypnotized highs or low hypnotizables
• Hypnotized highs reported more new correct
  memories
• Hypnotized highs did not differ in terms of
  percentage of correct memories

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Posthypnotic Amnesia

• Involuntary Amnesia
• Retrieval Failure (True Amnesia)
• Report Failure (Response Inhibition)
• Voluntary Amnesia
• Retrieval Failure (Retrieval Avoidance)
• Simulated Amnesia (Faked Amnesia)