The motivational unconscious

Motives may be said to be unconscious in a variety of ways. They may be automatically and unconsciously elicited by consciously perceptible situational cues; they may be instigated by cues that are themselves excluded from conscious awareness, as expressions of implicit perception or memory; or the person may be consciously unaware of his or her actual motivational state. The paper reviews the evidence pertaining to all three aspects of unconscious motivation, with emphasis on conceptual and methodological questions that arise in the study of motives which are not accessible to phenomenal awareness or voluntary control but nonetheless influence the individual's experience, thought, and action

Hypnosis as an altered state of consciousness

The status of hypnosis as an altered state of consciousness (ASC) has long been controversial. The classic phenomena of hypnosis, such as sensory anaesthesias, analgesia, amnesia, and posthypnotic suggestion, provide prima facie evidence of altered consciousness, but some theorists contend that these are the products of normal mental processes, such as suggestion and expectation. In this article, hypnosis is viewed against a general framework for describing ASCs in terms of four converging operations: induction procedure, subjective experience, behavioural correlates, and physiological correlates. Although ʼneutral’ hypnosis, in the absence of specific suggestions, has few distinctive characteristics, many of the classic phenomena of hypnosis involve dissociations between explicit and implicit memory, or perception, such that percepts, memories, and thoughts influence ongoing experience, thought, and action outside conscious awareness and control

Hypnotic Tactile Anesthesia: Psychophysical and Signal-Detection Analyses.

Two experiments that studied the effects of hypnotic suggestions on tactile sensitivity are reported. Experiment 1 found that suggestions for anesthesia, as measured by both traditional psychophysical methods and signal-detection procedures, were linearly related to hypnotizability. Experiment 2 employed the same methodologies in an application of the real-simulator paradigm to examine the effects of suggestions for both anesthesia and hyperesthesia. Significant effects of hypnotic suggestion on both sensitivity and bias were found in the anesthesia condition but not for the hyperesthesia condition. A new bias parameter, C', indicated that much of the bias found in the initial analyses was artifactual, a function of changes in sensitivity across conditions. There were no behavioral differences between reals and simulators in any of the conditions, though analyses of postexperimental interviews suggested the 2 groups had very different phenomenal experiences