Suggestibility

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A person is deemed to be suggestible if they accept and act on suggestions by others.

A person experiencing intense emotions tends to be more receptive to ideas and therefore more suggestible. Young children are generally more suggestible than older children who are more suggestible than adults.

However, psychologists have found that individual levels of self-esteem, assertiveness, and other qualities can make some people more suggestible than others — i.e. they act on others' suggestions more of the time than other people. This has resulted in this being seen as a spectrum of suggestibility.

1 Suggestibility and hypnosis
- 1.1 Experimental suggestion vs. clinical suggestion
2 Other cases of suggestibility
3 See also
4 External links

[edit] Suggestibility and hypnosis

This has ramifications in the scientific research of hypnosis. It is theorized in some cases, the hypnotic subject may not actually be entering a different psychological or physiological state, but rather just acting on social pressure. It is easier for them to comply than to disobey. This view does not discount the claim that hypnotized individuals are truly experiencing suggested effects, just that the mechanism by which this has taken place has in part been socially constructed and is not necessarily reliant on the idea of an altered state of consciousness.

[edit] Experimental suggestion vs. clinical suggestion

The applications of hypnosis vary widely and can, for the sake of disambiguation, be usefully separated into two non-exclusive broad divisions:

Experimental hypnosis: the study of "experimental suggestion", which is directed at the question:

"What is it that my group of test subjects actually do when I deliver the precise standard suggestion ABC to each of them in the same experimental context?"

(i.e., given a fixed suggestion, what is the outcome?)

Clinical hypnosis: the study of "clinical suggestion", which is directed at the question:

"What is it that I can possibly say to this particular subject, in this specific context, in order to generated my goal outcome of having them do XYZ?"

(i.e., given a fixed outcome, what is the suggestion?)

It is important to recognize that many scholars and practitioners use the wider term clinical hypnosis in order to distinguish clinical hypnosis from its far narrower sub-set, clinical hypnotherapy (i.e., a clinical intervention in which "therapy" is conducted upon a hypnotized subject), because there are many circumstances in which "clinical hypnosis" can be efficacious where there is, so to speak, no "pathology" or "disease" of any kind present that needs to be "therapized".

[edit] Other cases of suggestibility

It is claimed that sufferers of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Dissociative Identity Disorder are particularly suggestible.^{[citation needed]} While it is true that DID sufferers tend to score to the higher end of the hypnotizability scale, there have not been enough studies done to support the claim of increased suggestibility.^{[citation needed]}