ABSTRACT
There is perhaps no one domain within the field of hypnosis that divides researchers and clinicians more than their sharply differing viewpoints about the use of standardized tests to assess hypnotic responsiveness in people. This chapter explores the conflicting viewpoints and presents several of the more widely used instruments and approaches for assessing hypnotic responsiveness. While it is a relatively unanimous observation shared by almost everyone in the field that people differ substantially in their hypnotic abilities, the use of a standardized means for assessing individual responsiveness seems to be undesirable to most clinicians, who apparently would rather learn from direct experience with the client what his or her unique hypnotic talents might be. In one of the few studies of its kind, Sheldon Cohen (1989) surveyed faculty members teaching at an annual meeting of the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis (ASCH), the largest national professional hypnosis society in the world, regarding their use of formal measures of hypnotizability. Cohen discovered that only slightly more than half of respondents had ever used tests of hypnotic responsiveness, and of these fewer than a third were current users.
