Hi, I'm Michael Corayer and this is Psych Exam Review. In this video we're going to talk about
hypnosis. Now when you think of hypnosis you might think of stage demonstrations or things
you've seen on TV or in movies where a hypnotist has total control over a person, right? They'll
obey the every command of the hypnotist and do all sorts of outrageous things. But this isn't really
what hypnosis is about and most of these kinds of demonstrations are staged. So what are we talking
about when we talk about hypnosis? What we're referring to is a state of relaxation and this is
a state where people show focused attention and increased imagination and the state is brought
about through hypnotic induction. And so this is a process where a hypnotist guides a person,
essentially helps them to enter this relaxed state, and once the person is in this state the
hypnotist makes suggestions to the person and the person will respond to these suggestions
because of this increased state of attention and imagination. Now people will vary in how much they
respond to these suggestions of the hypnotist and so this varied strength of response is referred
to as a person's hypnotic suggestibility. Some people are highly hypnotizable and this means
that they respond very strongly. They get sort of absorbed in these suggestions of the hypnotist
whereas other people don't experience this. Now it's important to note that when we talk about
somebody who's highly hypnotizable the idea of hypnotic suggestibility is not the same
as gullibility. We're not saying that you know some people just accept everything the hypnotist
says without question and if you give people this negative connotation, you suggest that,
you know, their ability to be hypnotized is about how gullible they are then suddenly
their hypnotic suggestibility decreases, right? Another important point is that even people who
are highly hypnotizable retain a sense of will throughout the process of hypnosis. So anyone
who's hypnotized is still in control of their own behavior. Alright so a hypnotist can't get people
to do things that they wouldn't otherwise do, alright? A hypnotist couldn't get somebody to,
you know, commit a crime or something just because they were under hypnosis. Ok, so what can hypnosis
be used for? Well one of the most important uses for hypnosis is analgesia and this is just another
way of saying pain reduction. So hypnosis can be effective for reducing pain and this means that
it can be used for minor surgical procedures and dental work and minor injuries and things
that. It can actually reduce the pain that people experience and it also can improve healing. So
people can recover more quickly with the help of hypnotic suggestion. Now this might remind you of
the placebo effect that we talked about earlier, right? Where receiving a false treatment can
still help people to get better. Now in this case, when I say that hypnosis might be related to the
placebo effect, I'm not using that in a derogatory sense. I'm not saying that, you know, hypnosis is
not creating any real effect. What I'm saying is that it might be another way of accessing this
placebo effect, this sort of healing power that we have that's based on belief and expectation.
Hypnosis may be another way of getting access to that and using it to help people to recover. Now
this means that hypnosis can be used for a number of problems and it's particularly helpful for
stress-related problems and this is most likely due to the idea that hypnosis involves entering
this state of relaxation. And so it can help teach people how to relax and so these stress-related
problems that hypnosis can be used to effectively treat are things like skin problems like
psoriasis, which is related with stress. We have asthma, here's another stress-related problem.
So stress can worsen the symptoms of asthma and hypnosis can help to reduce that and it can also
be useful in helping obesity and reducing stress related to obesity. So I think I've mentioned in a
previous video that there's a relationship between obesity and stress. I think I talked about it in
the relationship with sleep deprivation which increases stress but anyway hypnosis can be
effectively used to help treat these problems. It's less effective for things like addictions,
so hypnosis is sometimes used for addiction to things like alcohol or nicotine but it doesn't
show the same effectiveness that it shows with these stress-related problems. Now an important
thing is that what hypnosis can't be used for and this is gaining access to lost memories;
recovering memories through hypnosis or finding repressed memories, alright? So this is not
actually a proper use of hypnosis because the memories that are supposedly recalled are not
necessarily accurate and what happens is false memories can be implanted because the suggestions
of the hypnotist can cause people to think that they remember something when in fact it's actually
the result of the suggestion. So people may feel more confident in memories that they uncover from
hypnosis, that doesn't mean that these memories are accurate. So we have to be especially careful
because it's a dangerous combination. Because sometimes hypnosis has been used to supposedly
recover memories that relate to crimes or to childhood abuse and these kinds of allegations
are pretty serious and we want to make sure that the memories of them are accurate and they
they're not the result of suggestions from the hypnotist, even if the hypnotist isn't aware that
this is happening. So we shouldn't trust memories recovered from hypnosis any more than we would
trust any other kinds of memories and in fact maybe we could trust them even less. There is one
relationship with hypnosis and memory that I want to mention and this is the idea that a hypnotist
can suggest to a person that they won't remember much about the hypnotic session and this actually
does work. This can reduce people's memory of the session and this is called posthypnotic amnesia.
A hypnotist actually can get people to forget some parts of the hypnotic recession if they are
directed to do that. Ok, so those are some uses of hypnosis so now we'll look at some theories.
What's going on with hypnosis? Well we have two theories that we'll look at. The first theory is
the idea that hypnosis is not a separate state of consciousness. It suggests that people are just
kind of playing along; the hypnotist is making suggestions and people are going along with them
and you know maybe they're imagining it a little more detail than they might otherwise, but that
it's not an altered state of consciousness. And so this is role theory of hypnosis. So the
idea is that people are playing a role. They're essentially acting out these suggestions and so
the hypnotist is sort of like the director and the hypnotized subjects are playing this role
and going along with it. Now one of the problems with this theory is that people can follow these
suggestions of a hypnotist even when they don't think that they're being observed. So this would
suggest if they were merely acting or just playing along, if they didn't think anybody was observing
them, then they probably wouldn't continue to play along. But actually people do continue to
follow the suggestions of a hypnotist even if they don't think that they're being observed. So this
suggests that role theory isn't a full explanation of what's going on. This brings us to another
theory of hypnosis and this is called dissociation theory and this was proposed by Ernest Hilgard and
Hilgard suggested that there's a dissociation that occurs. Dissociation means a separation and so he
thought of it as an altered state of consciousness and the idea was that people would separate their
experience from their awareness. And the way that Hilgard demonstrated this was using pain because,
as I said, hypnosis can effectively reduce pain. So what Hilgard did was he had people put their
hands in ice water and this is painful. You kind of hold your hand in ice water. Now if you're
fishing around in a cooler or something it gets painful pretty quickly and so what Hilgard did
was he had hypnotized subjects hold their hands in ice water and he asked them about the pain and
he asked about the experience of the pain. And as you might expect people who were hypnotized
experienced less pain, but when he asked people about their awareness of the pain he got different
answers. They said they were aware that holding their hand in the ice water was painful but they
just weren't feeling the pain. They weren't experiencing it. So this sort of separation,
this dissociation, is that the pain, you know, pain messages are there. There's an awareness
of the pain but the emotional response to that, the experience of pain, is what's being reduced
by hypnosis. And so this is what led Hilgard to propose this dissociation theory. And this would
suggest that hypnosis is actually a different type of consciousness than your normal waking
consciousness, right? In the next video we'll look at another possible altered state of consciousness
that's quite similar to hypnosis and this comes from meditation. I hope you found this helpful,
if so, please like the video and subscribe to the channel for more. Thanks for watching!