Hypnosis and Personality: Determining Hypnotizability Through BIG 5 Traits

CREVELING 55

There are three theories to define hypnosis: the desire of the subject to play the role of a hypnotized subject, increase suggestibility, and the participant entering a state of altered state of consciousness (Orne, 1959). Hypnosis is measured by the participants suggestibility to hypnosis. To test a participant’s suggestibility to hypnosis, both the Harvard and Stanford hypnotic susceptibility tests are utilized. These sessions take close to three hours, making it a very time consuming process for both the researcher and participant. Granted the two tests are reliable, there must be an easier, and less time consuming way, to measure and determine suggestibility. The big five personality traits consist of five universal traits that can describes the participants personality. The big five traits consist of openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness and neuroticism. We hypothesized that we can measure a participants personality and be able to tell if they will be more susceptible to hypnosis based off the responses to three of the five traits. If a person were to score higher on openness, extraversion, or agreeableness, it was hypothesized that they would rate higher on the hypnotizability scale. The study analyzed the correlation between a participant's score on the Harvard and Stanford susceptibility tests and each of the Big Five traits from a sample of 50 right-handed females from a southwestern university. In addition to the correlation, the Big 5 traits and demographic variables of age and ethnicity will be regressed onto the Harvard and Stanford hypnotic susceptibility scores for best predictors of the latter.