Andras Kolto
Psychologist and a Specialist of Health Promotion. He is an Assistant Lecturer at Eötvös Loránd University, Budapest, Hungary. He teaches affective psychology, research methodology, and health promotion to undergraduate students. He investigates the associations between hypnosis and affective processing. Besides these activities, he also works at the National Institute of Health Promotion, were he is a Research Associate of the Health Behaviour in School-aged Children (HBSC) WHO collaborative international study. In his private practice, he provides counselling in psychosomatic problems, or to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transsexual clients.
Obstacles to hypnotic involvement: Cold parental behaviour predicts anxiety and negative feelings in hypnosis
Hypnosis can just occur if both the subject and the hypnotist are able to mentalize each other. Mentalization, the capacity to read and understand others’ and someone’s own mental states, is rooted in the relationship between the infant and the primary caretaker. Still, just a few research projects had been conducted to understand how parental rearing style influences adult hypnotisability so far, and these had not considered the possible mediating effect of mentalizing skills.
In a mixed-method study, relationships between recalled parental style, mentalizing abilities, and dimensions of hypnotic susceptibility were investigated. In sum, 298 subjects responded to measures on their mentalizing skills and memories of their parents. Then they participated in standard group hypnosis sessions. Finally, their feelings towards the hypnotist and their hypnotic experiences were assessed.
The most important finding was that recalling cold-punishing parents predicted 1) fear of negative appraisal by the hypnotist, 2) negative experiences in hypnosis. These associations, however, were mediated by alexithymia, the subject’s reduced ability for emotional processing. These results are consistent with the social-psychobiological theory of hypnosis, and suggest that regularly punished children experience a performance anxiety in the hypnotic situation, which may have deep impact on their involvement in hypnotherapy.
