The unbidden gaze: imagery and its relation to hypnosis

The purpose of this study was to assess the relationship between subjects' mental imaging ability, as assessed by self-report and computer measures, and hypnotic susceptibility 108 undergraduate students completed the Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire (Marks, 1973), and a modified form of the computerized Harvard Imagery Battery (Berardi et al, 1998). A subsequent 86 of these students had their hypnotic susceptibility assessed using the Waterloo-Stanford Group C measure of hypnotizability (Bowers, 1993). A correlation matrix of subjects' Vividness of Visual Imagery Questionnaire scores. Harvard Imagery Battery error rates, response times, responses times adjusted for simple reaction times and Waterloo-Stanford Group C hypnotizability scores failed to indicate any significant relationship between mental imagery ability and hypnotizability. Further analysis failed to indicate either a significant nonlinear relationship between hypnotizability and imagery ability or gender differences in the relationship.