The Creative Imagination Scale as a Measure of Hypnotic Responsiveness: Applications to Experimental and Clinical Hypnosis

Abstract

Existing scales that measure responses to suggestions are too authoritarian, imply to subjects that they are under the control of the experimenter or hypnotist, usually require a preceding trance induction, and were not constructed to be administered as easily in both a group and in an individual setting. To meet the need for a nonauthoritarian scale which (a) informs subjects that they are to produce the phenomena themselves, (b) can be given with or without a trance induction, and (c) can be administered as easily to an individual or to a group, a permissive scale measuring responsiveness to suggestions was constructed and was named the Creative Imagination Scale. The new scale includes 10 items (test-suggestions) that ask subjects to think and imagine, for example, that an arm is heavy, a finger is becoming numb, they are eating a delicious orange, they feel that time is slowing down, and they are reexperiencing themselves back in childhood. In a series of investigations, norms for the scale were developed and the scale was shown to have satisfactory test-retest reliability, split-half reliability, and factorial validity. The Creative Imagination Scale has been found to be a useful measure in four recent experimental studies and it should also prove useful in clinical settings.