2022/04/22 by Peter Lush, Anil K. Seth, Zoltán Dienes +1 · 1 voice
Psychology · Neuroscience · Medicine · #Action Observation and Synchronization #Psychology of Moral and Emotional Judgment #Psychosomatic Disorders and Their Treatments
paper · doi:10.31234/osf.io/hw4y9
openalex publication_date 2022/04/22 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We investigate the degree to which experiences in three experimental paradigms may arise from phenomenological control, i.e. from the way people can control their experience to meet expectancies and goals. In the experimental situation, expectancies and goals arise from demand characteristics (cues which communicate beliefs about experimental aims to participants). Trait phenomenological control has been shown to substantially predict experimental measures of changes in embodiment experience in which demand characteristics are not controlled (e.g., mirror touch and pain, and experiences of ownership of a fake hand). Here we report substantial relationships between scores on the Phenomenological Control Scale (PCS; a test of direct imaginative suggestion) and vEAR scores (reports of auditory experience for silent videos), ASMR scores but not the Müller-Lyer illusion. These findings indicate that vEAR and ASMR experiences may be implicit imaginative suggestion effects, but the Müller-Lyer illusion is unrelated to phenomenological control. This study demonstrates that relationships of trait phenomenological control with subjective reports about experience are not limited to embodiment and may confound a wide range of (but not all) measures in psychological science.