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Summarizes the personal, intellectual and social influences of psychologist Campbell Perry's life and research on hypnosis. Influence of Gordon Hammer and Philip Sutcliffe on his approach to hypnosis; Highlights of Perry's work on hypnosis and memory; Contributions to uncancelled hypnotic suggestions, pain and surgery, imagery and hypnotizability.

This article details a study investigating pseudomemory effects and their relationship to level of susceptibility to hypnosis and state instruction. The study has compared results for waking and hypnotic instruction but found no evidence for any distinctive hypnotic outcomes. One hundred sixty-eight undergraduate students, including 121 female and 47 male, have participated in the study. Four videotapes depicting perceptibly different versions of a bank robbery were used as the stimulus material. Two measures of imagery ability, the Betts Questionnaire of Mental Imagery and the Gordon Test of Visual Imagery Control, and one measure of absorption were used as filler activities for the waking group. This was to equate for time spent by the hypnotic subjects in hypnotic induction and deinduction. All subjects at the outset were told whether they would be hypnotized and were given an explanation of the study. Results of this study have strongly supported the hypothesis that a range of factors, including contextual, skill, and state instruction valuables, are associated with occurrence of pseudomemory report.

Variability in incidence of eidetic imagery (EI)-the so-called "will-o'- the-wisp" nature of El-can be considered in two ways. Regularity of occurrence of El can be studied across cultural communities and wit/tin individual cultural groups. The present study tested El in a group of Aboriginal children who previously were reported as showing a high incidence of this form of imagery. It also contrasted the performance of this group with the performance of another community of Aboriginal children who were even more isolated than the Bamyili sample from Western influence. Variability was evidenced across the two communities, but the same incidence of El was found within the Bamyili sample. The change in frequency of occurrence of El across unacculturated samples remains the essential puzzle of the phenomenon of eidetic imagery. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It was predicate in this study that as groups of Aboriginal children move further apart from each other in sophistication and pattern of cultural similarity to European society, then differences in experiences of eidetic imagery will become more apparent. Results partially supported the hypothesis, data indicating the strongest EI functioning among 8s in the least acculturated group. EI function contrasted with memory imagery function; the latter kind of imagery failed to differentiate groups appreciably in any consistent fashion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]