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the signal to get ready for naming the word or naming the color. The
experiential strategy was described as relaxing and letting responses
happen spontaneously without trying to do anything in particular to
make them happen. The positional strategy was described as focusing in
on a patch of color so the word itself becomes obscured when color-
naming and focusing back out on the word again for word-naming. A
Likert-scaled response format was used, ranging from one to five, where
one meant
hardly ever, if at all
and five meant
almost always
. Instructions
for the postexperimental inquiry included a plea for honesty and an
instruction to disregard the experimenter’s reactions when answering.
Participants first rated their nonhypnotized Stroop test on each of the
three strategies, followed by their hypnotized Stroop test.
The experiential strategy description was based on Tellegen’s (1981)
account of the experiential mental set as a mode of engaging attention,
which was distinct from that used in ‘‘active, realistic, voluntary, and
relatively effortful planning, and decision making and goal-directed
behavior’’ (p. 222). Tellegen labeled the latter as the instrumental set. In
a negative sense, the experiential set required the surrender of the
instrumental set, but in a positive sense it was characterized by an
effortless, nonvolitional quality of deep involvement with the object or
theme of awareness. Donovan (1989) considered a ‘‘no-strategy’’ ap-
proach to the Stroop task, also identified by Sheehan et al. (1988), as an
example of the experiential set in operation. Thus, the experiential
strategy description was devised to rate the use of this putative strategy
as distinct from the rehearsal or positional strategies.
R
ESULTS
Objective Stroop Performance Measures
For each participant, median reaction time was calculated for color-
naming no-change trials and word-naming no-change trials, for both
nonhypnotized and hypnotized Stroop tasks. For simplicity, these trial
types will be referred to below as color-naming and word-naming,
respectively. Responses that were incorrect or longer than 2 second
were not included in these calculations. A 2 (high susceptible, low
susceptible) 2 (hypnotized, nonhypnotized) 5 (rehearsal, no-strategy,
effortful concentration, relaxation, no-instruction) ANOVA was per-
formed on color-naming no-change reaction times. A significant main
effect was found for hypnosis,
F
(1, 122)
¼
12.43,
p
<
.01. As Table 1
shows, the mean color-naming reaction time was higher in the hypno-
tized condition than the nonhypnotized condition. No other significant
effects were found for this variable.
Word-naming reaction times (see Table 1) were also analyzed in this
way. A significant main effect was obtained for hypnosis instruction,
AN EMPIRICAL TEST OF DISSOCIATED CONTROL
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