Focused analgesia and generalized relaxation produce differential hypnotic analgesia in response to ascending stimulus intensity

American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, Jul 2004 by Hammond, D Corydon

Sharav, Y. & Tal, M. (2004). Focused analgesia and generalized relaxation produce differential hypnotic analgesia in response to ascending stimulus intensity. International Journal of Psychophysiology. 52(2), 187-196. This study examined the effects of different types of hypnotic suggestion on hypnotic analgesia.

Generalized relaxation and focused analgesia were induced in seven high-hypnotizable (HH) and eight low-hypnotizable (LH) subjects. The subjects were not aware to which group they belonged and the two groups did not differ in their expectation rates to achieve analgesia under hypnosis. Pain intensity and unpleasantness were rated by subjects on visual analogue scales in response to painful electrical stimuli, delivered in random order in five ascending intensities. It was found that both focused analgesia and generalized relaxation decreased pain intensity significantly (P 0.07), and the difference became more pronounced when analyzed for HH subjects only (P 0.10 for relaxation). The level of pain reduction was significantly higher in HH than in LH subjects under focused analgesia (P 0.5), which seemingly can benefit everyone to some degree. They concluded that by utilizing two modes of hypnotic suggestions in response to ascending stimuli, they were able to discover two components of hypnotic analgesia. One component, relaxation, shows a parallel shift in the stimulus-response function, has features similar to placebo and bears no clear relationship to hypnotic susceptibility. However, the analgesia component shows a slope change in the stimulus-response curve and has a positive relationship to hypnotic susceptibility. Address for reprints: Y. Sharav, Department of Oral Medicine, School of Dental Medicine, P.O. Box 1172, Jerusalem 91010, Israel; Department of Anatomy and Cell Biology, Schools of Dental Medicine and Medicine, Hebrew University-Hadassah, Jerusalem, Israel.