Hypnotizability, Personality Traits, and The Propensity to Experience Alterations of Consciousness

How hypnotizability relates to personality traits other than absorption has received scant attention even though hypnotizability exhibits clear and stable individual differences. Two personality constructs particularly germane to hypnotizability are mental boundaries and self-transcendence, since they seem to index the propensity to experience alterations in consciousness. We conducted two studies to evaluate their relations with behavioral and experiential measures of hypnotizability, and absorption. In study 1 (N = 112 US participants), experiential, but not behavioral, measures of hypnotizability, correlated with the personal (e.g., porosity in interpersonal relations or in states of consciousness), but not the world (e.g., opinions of others), subscale of boundary thinness and with absorption. In Study 2 (N = 84 Swedish participants), self-transcendence as a whole, as well as two of its three subscales (self-forgetfulness and transpersonal identification) related to hypnotizability, especially as measured experientially. Absorption correlated with an index of experiential hypnotizability in both studies, but was not reliably related to behavioral hypnotizability. The results suggest that experiential hypnotizability is related to the propensity to experience alterations in consciousness characterized by boundarylessness, self-transcendence, and absorption. They also highlight the importance of supplementing behavioral indices of hypnotizability with experiential measures. 3 Individual differences in the propensity to experience spontaneous alterations of consciousness have been described for centuries. Recognition of such differences in the West can be traced back to Plato's classification of the manias (Pieper, 1964) and to the Classical Greek mysteries (Ustinova, 2011). With the development of psychology as a discipline, researchers at the turn of the 19 th century studied various alterations of consciousness, foremost hypnosis and dissociation, which denotes a failure of integration of psychological processes (Spiegel & Cardeña, 1991). William James proposed that individuals vary in their ability to access consciousness " beyond the margins " (Taylor, 1996), as did Théodore Flournoy who wrote " All the difference between mediums and ordinary people, is that with the latter there is practically a very marked trench between dream and waking… With the mediums on the contrary " (Flournoy, 1902, in Shamdasani, 1994). F. W. H. Myers (1903) highlighted the permeability of the boundaries between subliminal (non-conscious) and supraliminal (conscious) processes, maintaining that individual differences in this permeability contributed to creativity, the propensity to experience also posited stronger or weaker forms of porosity among psychological processes and states (Hartmann, 1991). More recently, personality constructs related to the propensity to experience spontaneous alterations in consciousness have …