Questioning autistic people
Nichola Tyler, Anne Sheeran in Working with Autistic People in the Criminal Justice and Forensic Mental Health Systems, 2022
Compliance and suggestibility are two important factors to consider in the context of the criminal justice system. While both factors are related, there are important distinctions to note. Compliance refers to the tendency of an individual to outwardly agree or assent to propositions while internally disagreeing. Alternatively, suggestibility refers to an individual’s internal acceptance of information, particularly when recalling information. This definition refers to suggestibility more generally, rather than investigative suggestibility. Within a forensic context, such as an investigative interview context, suggestibility is a potential vulnerability during questioning. For instance, an individual who is significantly suggestible may be vulnerable to leading questions and interrogative pressure (e.g., Gudjonsson, 2018).
Descriptive and Psychodynamic Psychopathology EMIs
Michael Reilly, Bangaru Raju in Extended Matching Items for the MRCPsych Part 1, 2018
Alcoholic dementia.Confabulation of embarrassment.Dissociative amnesia.Echolalia.Fantastic confabulation.Ganser syndrome.Korsakoff psychosis.Mamillary body.Negativism.Parietal lobe.Subthalamic nucleus.Suggestibility.
Offenders and alleged offenders with mental disorder in non-medical settings
John C. Gunn, Pamela J. Taylor in Forensic Psychiatry, 2014
If a doctor is involved in this procedure, the tasks are to make sure that the accused is fit to be interviewed at all and, if so, that the interview is carried out appropriately given the mental state of the accused. Advice may be given as to how mental abnormalities, such as delusions, thought disorder or amnesia, could make the interview unreliable. One feature which a frightened or abnormal suspect may exhibit is suggestibility, with the effect of agreeing too readily with leading questions. If this is an issue before, during or after an interview, a separate psychological opinion should be sought. Gudjonsson (1984a) has developed a scale of interrogative suggestibility which can improve objectivity in distinguishing between false confessors and deniers (Gudjonsson, 1984b; and see also chapter 6).
Abstracts from the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis 72nd Annual Conference
Published in International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, 2022
Hypnotic suggestibility denotes a capacity to respond positively to direct verbal suggestions in an involuntary manner in the context of hypnosis. Elucidating the characteristics of this ability has bearing on responsiveness to suggestions in a variety of clinical and non-clinical contexts. A considerable amount of research has focused on a small subgroup of individuals who display strong responsiveness to hypnotic suggestions. However, it remains poorly understood whether these highly suggestible individuals constitute a discrete subgroup (taxon) that is characterized by a qualitatively distinct mode of responding from the remainder of the population or whether hypnotic suggestibility is better modeled as a dimensional ability. In this study, we applied taxometric analysis, a statistical method for distinguishing between dimensional and categorical models of a psychological ability, to behavioral and involuntariness subscale scores of the Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility Scale: Form A (HGSHS:A) in a sample of neurotypical individuals (N = 584). Analyses of HGSHS:A behavioral and involuntariness subscale scores with different a priori taxon base rates yielded consistent evidence for a dimensional structure. These results suggest that hypnotic suggestibility, as measured by the HGSHS:A, is dimensional and have implications for current understanding of individual differences in responsiveness to direct verbal suggestions.
Preserved critical ability and free will in deep hypnosis during oral surgery
Published in American Journal of Clinical Hypnosis, 2021
Enrico Facco, Christian Bacci, Edoardo Casiglia, Gastone Zanette
As concerns suggestion, Bernheim himself was well aware that subjects had to accept a suggestion before they could implement it, and that they could resist doing so. This being the case, the power of suggestion used to mean the result of a lessened critical capacity or impaired free will is untenable. Furthermore, as mentioned earlier, the role of suggestibility in clinical hypnosis remains uncertain, ill-defined, and not specific to hypnosis (Tasso & Perez, 2008). A meta-analysis of clinical trials identified only a weak (but significant) association between hypnotic suggestibility and treatment outcome, where suggestibility accounted for about 6% of its variance, casting doubts on the usefulness of hypnotic suggestibility and its assessment in clinical contexts (Montgomery, Schnur, & David, 2011). It is worth noting that hypnotic suggestibility seems to be more closely related to responsiveness to suggestions in experimental studies (Oakley & Halligan, 2013), so it might be self-referential – bearing in mind that hypnotic susceptibility scales (like the SHSS) are based on the construct of suggestibility. If this is the case, it raises some concern about the scales’ clinical validity.
Individual Differences in Children’s Suggestibility: An Updated Review
Published in Journal of Child Sexual Abuse, 2020
J. Zoe Klemfuss, Alma P. Olaguez
In Bruck and Melnyk’s review, the authors provided direction for the burgeoning field of individual differences in suggestibility, pointing out that “although not entirely consistent, there are indeed some concepts and skills that may mirror underlying mechanisms of suggestibility in childhood and deserve future study” (p. 949). The present review addresses the extent to which this call has been answered. However, Bruck and Melnyk also concluded that the only individual difference informative to forensic practice was intellectual impairment. At the time, the body of literature had not identified any other individual differences with sufficiently robust relations with suggestibility. A second goal of the present review was to revisit this question and assess whether we can offer additional guidance to forensic practitioners regarding which characteristics may make children most susceptible to suggestive influence.
Related Knowledge Centers
- Assertiveness
- Automatic Behavior
- Emotion
- Hypnotic Susceptibility
- Memory
- Volition
- Recall
- Self-Esteem
- Misinformation Effect
- Hypnosis