HYPNOTIZABILITY AND DISSOCIATION IN A COLLEGE-AGE POPULATION - ORTHOGONAL INDIVIDUAL-DIFFERENCES

In a sample of 886 college undergraduates, we examine the relationship between dissociative experiences and hypnotic susceptibility, which has been shown to be a stable individual difference. Although the phenomena of dissociation and hypnosis have been closely associated in both the scientific and popular literature since at least the 1880s, our current research using two standard measures of dissociative experiences (The Dissociative Experiences Scale and the Questionnaire of Experiences of Dissociation) and a traditional measure of hypnotic susceptibility (The Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility) reports an orthogonal relationship between these factors. A lack of relation exists even if only difficult hypnotic tasks are used. Theoretically, this research suggests that it may be important to distinguish between voluntary and involuntary pathway to dissociative experiences.