other than Sarbin’s
However, other than Sarbin’s (1956) discussion of role-taking ability, there has been very little theoretical development within the socio-cognitive tradition of an account for how these kinds of social roles and response expectancies are actually ascertained and adopted by hypnotic subjects. After all, there must be some psychological mech- anism that allows hypnotic subjects to adopt these attitudes, cognitions, expectancies, and roles, or else they simply would not have any effect on people even on an uncon- scious, implicit, or automatic basis (Kirsch & Lynn, 1999). Furthermore, it has been similarly difficult to research how response expectancies and roles are adopted by the brain since there has been no real accounting of a hypothesized process that could explain how roles and expectancies are psychologically absorbed into human beings. Empathy may therefore be the missing link in explaining how socio-cognitive processes are mediated within a person. Processes of empathy may be required for participants to empathically enact and embody the expectations, roles, perspectives, imagery, emo- tions, somatic symptoms, and/or body language suggested to them through hypnotic
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inductions, psycho-educational interventions prior to experiencing hypnosis, and a myr- iad of potential manipulations of the social psychological context in which the hypnotic relationship takes place (Wickramasekera II & Szlyk, 2003). This study now turns to an examination of the psychological research and findings in neuroscience that implicate empathy as a process that is deeply involved with hypnosis.
Psychological Research on Empathy and Hypnosis
There have been two studies that have examined the relationship between hypnotic abil- ity and empathy directly (Wickramasekera II & Szlyk, 2003; Wickramasekera II & Ran, 2008). Both studies have essentially found modest significant correlations between hyp- notic ability and empathy consistent with the predictions of the EIT. There have also been six studies of the relationship between absorption, a personality correlate of hyp- notic ability, and empathy, which all demonstrate a moderate relationship between the tendency to enter into focused states of awareness (absorption) and to engage in empathic experiences (Rivers, Wickramasekera II, & Pekala, 2006; Wickramasekera II, 2007a; Wickramasekera II & Szlyk, 2003; Wickramasekera II & Ran, 2008). A related study by Cardeña, Terhune, Lööf, and Buratti (2008) also found a relationship between automatic and implicit aspects of empathy (emotional contagion) and hypnosis. A recent study by Peter et al. (2015) found that high hypnotizables are more likely to report having an unselfish and self-sacrificing style, which the authors concluded is consistent with the EIT. Furthermore, a previous study conducted by Lynn et al. (1991) found that varying the amount of rapport (an empathy-like experience) that a hypnotist utilized had a pos- itive effect on encouraging hypnotic behaviors and experiences. Overall, these studies collectively do seem to indicate that empathy is a trait that can be reliably found in high hypnotizables and that empathy is important for initiating a hypnotic relationship as pre- dicted by the EIT. However, only a few of these studies controlled for context effects (Council, Kirsch, & Hafner, 1986), and many utilized a subject self-selection design that has demonstrated some potential confounds in previous hypnosis research (Barabasz & Barabasz, 1992). Meanwhile, a number of studies in medicine and neuroscience have been published that also seem to implicate that empathy and hypnosis are related.
