MAY 2008, VOLUME 36, NUMBER 2, Abstract 16
Whose Hand is that? Changes in Agency and Self-Awareness in Hypnosis
Vince Polito, Amanda J. Barnier, and Robyn A. Langdon, Macquarie University, Sydney
Agency, the subjective experience that our conscious intentions cause our actions, is a key issue in psychology, philosophy, and neuroscience. It is clear that under certain conditions a person’s subjective sense of agency can be dramatically inconsistent with their objective actions. An example of this is anarchic hand syndrome, a clinical condition in which a patient’s arm makes unintended actions outside of their control. The cause and underlying processes by which such changes in agency occur are poorly understood. In this paper I describe my use of hypnosis, which also involves shifts in participants’ sense of agency, to develop an analogue of anarchic hand syndrome. I gave participants a suggestion that the movements of their arm were outside of their control and then asked them to tickle themselves. I compared participants’ ratings of ticklishness and judgments of the source of the tickling with baseline measures in which, before hypnosis, participants tickled themselves or the hypnotist tickled them. I discuss the results and implications of this task for understanding agentive shifts within hypnosis.