Hypnotic Suggestion and the Modulation of Stroop Interference

  • Raz, Amir PhD
  • Shapiro, Theodore MD
  • Fan, Jin PhD
  • Posner, Michael I. PhD

  • From the Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology, Weill Medical College of Cornell University, New York, NY.

Corresponding author and reprints: Amir Raz, PhD, Sackler Institute for Developmental Psychobiology, Department of Psychiatry, Weill Medical College of Cornell University, 1300 York Ave, Box 140, New York, NY 10021 (e-mail: [email protected]).

Financial support was provided by the DeWitt Wallace-Reader's Digest Research Fellowship in Psychiatry (Dr Raz).

We thank Irving Kirsch, PhD, Colin M. MacLeod, PhD, Derek Besner, PhD, Heidi E. Sormaz, PhD, Gerald P. Marinoff, MD, Julius Kuhl, PhD, Miguel Kazén, PhD, Herbert Spiegel, MD, David Spiegel, MD, Bruce D. McCandliss, PhD, and Jessica M. Pollard, BA, for constructive comments on this article.

Submitted for publication November 2, 2001; final revision received January 25, 2002; accepted March 6, 2002.

Archives of General Psychiatry 59(12):p 1155-1161, December 2002.

Background

Hypnosis has been used clinically for hundreds of years and is primarily a phenomenon involving attentive receptive concentration. Cognitive science has not fully exploited hypnosis and hypnotic suggestion as experimental tools. This study was designed to determine whether a hypnotic suggestion to hinder lexical processing could modulate the Stroop effect.

Methods

Behavioral Stroop data were collected from 16 highly suggestible and 16 less suggestible subjects; both naturally vigilant and under posthypnotic suggestion. Subjects were urged to only attend to the ink color and to impede reading the stimuli under posthypnotic suggestion.

Results

Whereas posthypnotic suggestion eliminated Stroop interference for highly suggestible subjects, less suggestible control subjects showed no significant reduction in the interference effect.

Conclusions

This outcome challenges the dominant view that word recognition is obligatory for proficient readers, and may provide insight into top-down influences of suggestion on cognition.

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