The Empathic Neuroscience
The Empathic Neuroscience of Hypnosis
A number of experiments conducted by Elvira Lang and her colleagues (Lang et al., 2000, 2008) have demonstrated that utilizing empathy by itself (as well as with hypno- sis) can help patients significantly reduce their experience of pain and suffering during invasive medical procedures. These findings seem to again raise the possibility that there is something entrancing about empathy that is capable of providing some anal- gesia and anxiolysis during an invasive medical procedure just through having a medical
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professional engage in an empathic intervention with them. However, the hypnosis group in these experiments benefitted more in terms of analgesia, anxiolysis, and the rate of adverse effects than the empathic attention group. The additional benefit may be due to the specific hypnotic suggestions that they received in addition to the hypnotic-like relationship of therapeutic empathy.
There have been a number of studies linking the autonomic psychophysiology of empathy with hypnosis as well. Eve Banyai (1998) demonstrated that there is a ten- dency for participants in hypnotic relationships (i.e., the hypnotist and the hypnotic subject) to mirror each other’s body language and autonomic psychophysiology as the hypnotic experience deepens. This kind of mirroring is evident in the overt body move- ments that each person makes, the body postures that they hold, and the synchrony between measures of their psychophysiology, such as respiration and electromyography (muscle tension). These studies essentially provided the first direct psychophysiologi- cal evidence of an automatic and implicit empathy-related process operating within the hypnotic relationship.
However, the idea that mirroring and imitation might contagiously spread from one person to another is something discussed in both the psychoanalytic understanding of transference and countertransference (Tansey & Burke, 1989) and the Ericksonian tra- ditions of hypnosis (Rossi & Rossi, 2006). Freud (1922) speculated that the experience of countertransference might emerge as a genuine empathic experience from an ana- lyst’s attempt to formulate how his/her countertransference experience embodies the projective identification of his/her patient (Tansey & Burke, 1989). Freud’s theory was essentially that we pick up on the projections of others through imitation and can then form an empathic model of their mind through mirroring them. Wickramasekera II and Ran (2008) were able to partially validate this idea by demonstrating that the strength of a person’s transference response in hypnosis is moderately related to both their trait empathy and hypnotic ability. In this sense, the trance of transference may be due to the trance-inducing nature of strong empathic experiences, such as hypnosis and projective identification.
More recently, Stephen Porges (2011) independently proposed that this kind of uncon- scious tendency for people to come into a state of psychophysiological convergence with one another is a sign that the social engagement system of their body is empathically responding to the other person. The social engagement system of the body is described as an unconscious and automatic system that evaluates the emotions of others (empa- thy) and also engages in affective bonding and mirroring responses with them. Porges discovered that much of this response occurs in the body via the vagus nerve (Porges, 2011) and that cardiac vagal tone (heart rate variability) is a good index of the employ- ment of this kind of unconscious engagement and psychophysiological synchrony with other people. Harris, Porges, Clemenson, and Vincenz (1993) were the first to discover that cardiac vagal tone is a reliable predictor of hypnotic ability. Subsequent research by Diamond, Davis, and Howe (2008) has even shown that cardiac vagal tone can be a
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