ABSTRACT
The question of degrees of hypnotizability in children is not new. In the 1880s, Liebault (Tinterow, 1970), struggled with it in his studies of hypnotizability that included subjects from early childhood to over 60 years of age. In the 1930s, Hull (1933) and his students, especially Messerschmidt (1933a,b), studied children’s responses to waking suggestibility items. Although they did not equate suggestibility with hypnotizability, the two traits were positively correlated. The results of the early studies were quite similar to more recent studies. That is, early research concluded that hypnotizability and suggestibility are quite limited in young children, increase markedly in the middle childhood years from about 7 to 14, and then decrease somewhat in adolescence, becoming quite stable throughout early and mid-adulthood and tailing off again in the older population.
