2019/04/16 by Peter Lush, Vanessa Botan, R. B. Y. Scott +3 · 2 citations
Neuroscience · Psychology · #Pain Management and Placebo Effect #Action Observation and Synchronization
paper · doi:10.31234/osf.io/82jav
openalex publication_date 2019/04/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
[Published in Nature Communications as Trait phenomenological control predicts experience of mirror synaesthesia and the rubber hand illusion] The control of top down processes to generate experience has been studied within the context of hypnosis since the birth of psychological science. 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. The possibility that they account for experiential change in psychological studies has been overlooked. In large sample studies (of 156, 404 and 353 participants) we report substantial relationships between hypnotisability and experimental measures of experiential change (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.