4. Can anyone be hypnotized, or only certain people?

4.3. Can hypnotizability be modified?

In spite of the fact that hypnotizability frequently remains constant overtime, the capacity to be hypnotized can be changed to some degree withspecific training of various kinds. The most general requisite capacity, aswe saw in the description of the FPP above is the ability to focusconcentration internally and become extremely absorbed in imaginativeactivity.

One general review of this work can be found in Michael Diamond's"Modification of hypnotizability: A review," in Psychological Bulletin, 81: 180-198. Diamond examines several experiments where music, silence,psychedelic drugs, biofeedback, sensory deprivation, hypnotic behavioraltraining, operant conditioning, and relaxation training were used to attemptto modify response to hypnosis.

Another review can be found in Wicramasekera's 1976, Biofeedback, BehaviorTherapy, and Hypnosis, which proposes that imagination training,suggestions for adventurousness, use of psychedelic drugs, sensorydeprivation, and biofeedback training all can have a lasting effect onhypnotizability.

A different approach is that taken by Gorassini and Spanos, 1986, "Asociocognitive skills approach to the succesful modification of hypnoticsusceptibility," Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 50:1004-1012. They propose the CSTP, a program for enhancing certain responsesunder hypnosis by training individual's in the individual behaviors used tomeasure hypnotic susceptibility. There are likely various different ways inwhich suggestion-related responses can be produced, and we already have seenthat objective measures for distinguishing hypnosis from simulation have notyet been developed, if indeed they are possible or practical at all.Subjective experiential response is apparently not modified with theCSTP, at least not to the degree that 'imagination training' helps modifysubjective response to hypnosis. Spanos suggests that further research inthis area should make more clear distinctions between compliance,reinterpreting and reclassifying experience, and changes in sensoryexperience in order to further delineate what is going on in hypnoticresponses.