Hypnosis In Psychotherapy

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Although hypnosis has for a long time been considered as a misterious and controversial topic, a lot of renowned scientists in Psychology have been intrigued and interested in it (Lynn and Kirsch, 2006). In my essay what interests me is the way the psychological phenomena of hypnosis works, whether and how it can be used for managing pain. Is it successful at all in reducing someone´s pain? In order to find the answers different scientific theories and laboratory experiments are taken into account, mainly analyzing this problem from biological and cognitive point of view.
My research question therefore is: Does hypnosis prove to be successful in managing laboratory induced acute physical pain?
Hypnosis is a fundament for the Western understanding of psychotherapy, involving interaction between a doctor (hypnotist) and a patient (subject) (Spiegel, 2013). Kirsch (1994) defines hypnosis as a procedure to facilitate therapy …show more content…
It is considered to be an arguable subject, since it is not clear whether and to what extent true pain can be associated with the laboratory-induced. Hypnotizability is the tendency to respond positively to different suggestions after a hypnotic induction, which could be measured with different scales, such as the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale (Jensen and Petterson, 2014). The possible scores obtained on the scale are 0-12, from 8 to 12 being high hypnotizable. Studies have demonstrated the correlation between hypnotizability and the extent of reduction of pain. For example Williams et al. (2010) did an experiment demonstrating that high susceptible participants with the help of hypnotic analgesia were more efficient in modulating the processing of experimentally induced painful stimuli. The reaction times for correctly identified target stimuli were also significantly slower during hypnotic analgesia in high hypnotizable

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