I was wondering does anyone know what ever became of the Documentary May Berg was shootong about the case? I heard she worked closely with Amanda Hobbs? But then I didn't hear anything more about it...
Oh goodie. Let’s discuss Amanda Hobb’s hypnosis as a means of helping her "recall" things.
The first problem with hypnosis is suggestibility. Ainslie Meares, President of the International Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, wrote in Hypnosis in Modern Medicine: In our everyday clinical practice there is no doubt that the increased suggestibility is the most conspicuous feature of the hypnotized patient. We offer the suggestion; the patient carries it out. The majority of psychiatrists will quickly answer that hypnosis is a state of increased suggestibility. (p. 392)
George H. Estabrooks, author of the book
Hypnotism stated: The subject will accept any suggestion the operator gives, within certain limits . (New York, E. P. Dutton & Company, 1957, p. 24)
Dr. Jay Katz, Professor (Adjunct) of Law and Psychiatry at Yale University and Attending Psychiatrist at the Yale New Haven Medical Center, gave a sworn affidavit to the Clay Shaw defense team on the dangers of testimony obtained under hypnosis. What he had to say was consistent with all the new research on hypnotism including that found in "
Hypnotically Induced Testimony" by Martin T. Orne, David A. Soskis, David F. Dinges, and Emily Carota Orne, in Gary L. Wells and Elizabeth F. Loftus,
Eyewitness Testimony: Psychological Perspectives (Cambridge University Press, 1984).
Dr. Katz stated by allowing the hypnotist to define what is to be experienced, the hypnotized individual foregoes evaluation both of the nature of the suggestion and his or her reaction to it. Given a suggestion that is acceptable, subjects will attempt to respond without concern for whether the suggestion is logical or meaningful. Their increased willingness to accept suggestions in hypnosis inevitably requires that for the time they suspend critical judgment." (p. 174)
Following the hypnotic induction, the subject's attention is intensely focused on the hypnotist, and there is an increased tendency to please the hypnotist and to comply with both explicit and implicit demands of the hypnotist. (p. 175) Sometimes hypnotized subjects can be sensitive to even very subtle suggestions. Particularly interesting things happen during hypnotic "regression" when subjects are told to mentally return to an earlier time.
In one funny famous experiment, subjects were age regressed to their fourth birthday. Shockingly, these subjects accurately were able to remember the day of the week in 69% of the cases. When several different laboratories tried to replicate the finding of this study, they were unable to replicate them. It was found that the hypnotist in the first study asked subjects when regressed, "Was it Monday? Was it Tuesday? Was it Wednesday?" Subjects were asked to stop the researcher when the correct day was reached. However, the researcher had a perpetual calendar in front of him when asking the questions, and he knew what the right answer was. The notion that subjects were simply responding to subtle suggestions from the researcher was validated when different researchers went out and asked numerous intelligent 4-year-old children the day of the week. None of them knew. If real 4-year-olds didn’t know what day of the week it was, adults "regressed" to the age of four years wouldn’t know what day of the week their birthday occurred. (Orne, et al., pp. 181-182)
The second problem with hypnosis is confabulation. The hypnotic suggestion to relive a past event, when accompanied by questions about specific details, puts pressure on the subject to provide information for which actual memories may not be available. This situation may jog the subject's memory and produce some increased recall, but it will also cause the subject to fill in details that are plausible but not really memories. "Memory" can be created in hypnosis where none existed before, and the witness's memory may be irreversibly contaminated. (p. 181)
False memories are the third problem with hypnosis. Anything visualized during hypnosis remains in the memory and may come to be experienced by the witness as a real memories.
One interesting experiment asked hypnotized subjects whether they had, early one morning, been awakened by a loud noise. It had been determined that all slept soundly through the night in question. But many of the subjects accepted the suggestion, and reported that they did indeed hear some such noise. And strikingly, after being awakened from hypnosis, they continued to INSIST that they had heard a loud noise. (p. 191) Orne, et al. concluded: "Thus, the memories created by the leading question in hypnosis were experienced as if they were preexisting recollections that were unrelated to the hypnotic experience." (p. 191)
A fourth problem with using hypnosis is increased post-hypnotic certainty. Witnesses who tell their story with confidence and self-assurance are more likely to be believed by juries. Witnesses who have rehearsed their testimony under hypnosis are likely to be more confident on the stand. Unfortunately, witnesses under hypnosis will typically produce both an increase in accurately recalled details and an increase in inaccurate information resulting from suggestion, false memories, or confabulation. (p. 176)
When a crime witness is instructed to guess about the details of an event, these guesses not only tend to be reported as part of the original memory, but the witness may later be very confident about their accuracy. Similarly, witnesses who are briefed (before testifying) about former recollections become more confident of these recollections, especially when they were originally inaccurate. (p. 193) The more the altered memories are reported, the more firmly established they become to the witness and the more difficult they become to challenge under cross-examination.
http://www.psych.upenn.edu/history/orne/orneetal1979ijceh85102.html
http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/hypnosis.htm
Orne, M. T., Hilgard, E. R., Spiegel, H., Spiegel, D., Crawford, H.J., Evans, F. J., Orne, E. C., & Frischholz, E. J. The relation between the Hypnotic Induction Profile and the Stanford Hypnotic Susceptibility Scales, Forms A and C. International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 1979, 27, 85-102.
