Brief modification of suggestibility and hypnotic analgesia: Too good to be true?

A 10-minute training procedure, based on the Carleton Skill Training Progra m, has previously been reported to produce substantial increments in respon siveness to hypnotic suggestion. The authors attempted to replicate this ef fect and also assessed the impact of the training procedure on hypnotically suggested analgesia, Ninety-eight students who had been preselected for hi gh, medium, and low levels of initial suggestibility were randomly assigned to experimental and control groups. Training failed to increase overall su ggestibility scores or to enhance the effects of a suggestion for pain redu ction. Suggested pain reduction was more highly correlated with posttreatme nt suggestibility scores than with pretreatment suggestibility and, in a re gression analysis, only posttreatment suggestibility predicted pain reducti on uniquely.