Zoltan Dienes and Peter Lush, researchers of project 163/18 - Effects of a short-term mindfulness intervention on hypnotisability and mental health, supported by the BIAL Foundation, published the paper Trait phenomenological control predicts experience of mirror synaesthesia and the rubber hand illusion in the prestigious journal Nature Communications.
“In hypnotic responding, expectancies arising from imaginative suggestion drive striking experiential changes (e.g., hallucinations) — which are experienced as involuntary — according to a normally distributed and stable trait ability (hypnotisability). Such experiences can be triggered by implicit suggestion and occur outside the hypnotic context. In large sample studies (of 156, 404 and 353 participants), we report substantial relationships between hypnotisability and experimental measures of experiential change in mirror-sensory synaesthesia and the rubber hand illusion comparable to relationships between hypnotisability and individual hypnosis scale items. The control of phenomenology to meet expectancies arising from perceived task requirements can account for experiential change in psychological experiments”.
