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By Maria Ortega

Contact: Maria Ortega, WSU News Service, 509/335-7209, mortega@wsu.edu

Hypnosis Book Receives Arthur Shapiro Award

PULLMAN, Wash. - Washington State University Professor Arreed Barabasz received the 2005 Best Book on Hypnosis Arthur Shapiro Award for his book "Hypnotherapeutic Techniques 2E."

The award is bestowed by the preeminent Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, which is charted by the Board of Regents of the State of New York.

Barabasz, director of the Hypnosis Laboratory at WSU's College of Education, co-authored the book with John G. Watkins, a professor emeritus of psychology at the University of Montana. Their goal was to create a book that could be used as a text book for graduate students and as a resource manual for practitioners in the field of hypnosis, Barabasz said.

"People have many misconceptions about hypnosis, because of the staged shows," Barabasz said. "But psychological hypnosis has nothing to do with entertainment. Hypnosis involves attention, concentration and controlled imagination, where the patient is in control, not the practitioner."

Barabasz, who has 125 published research papers, said that hypnosis is a part of everyday life for most people. "Have you ever been driving and all of the sudden you realize that you do not remember the last two miles? What do you think happened? You were awake and your mind was doing the driving, but at the same time another part of your mind was dissociated from conscious processing. That is an example of spontaneous hypnosis," Barabasz said.

Hypnosis and its effects have been studied at Washington State University during the past 20 years through many experiments directed by Barabasz and his lab. "We have conducted research to study how hypnosis can be used to alter the immune system, smoking, attention deficit disorder, pain control and dermatological disorders," he said.

Hypnosis can also treat and even be more effective than standard procedures in problems such as irritable bowel syndrome or can be used for treatment of chronic pain or anxiety, Barabasz said. "Even the National Institutes of Health has officially accepted hypnosis as a treatment for many disorders," he said.

Since leaving his associated professorship at Harvard 1984, Barabasz and his graduate students at WSU have won 16 national awards for their research in hypnosis.

"We have produced award-wining research and graduated many students, and many of them are using hypnosis in their psychology practices to treat their patients. Two particular examples are Ph.D. students serving as army colonels in Iraq treating soldiers for stress syndromes," Barabasz said.

One of Barabasz's latest experiments involved age regression. "We were able to show one way as to how regression works and how adults could perceive like a five year old," Barabasz said. "We compared adults and children's reactions to a standard set of abstract figures to the reaction of adults who were age-regressed via hypnosis. Age regression can be used as an important tool for counseling and psychotherapy. But if you want to go back and re-experience the day you were born… I am sorry, that is bogus! The brain was at that time incapable of encoding the memory traces."

"One of the advantages of hypnosis is that it is a practice known in many different cultures, it is not solely a western-based practice, as nearly all of the other counseling and psychotherapy interventions. This multicultural adaptability is a valuable tool in health care because it opens doors to patients with different backgrounds. Hypnosis is also cost effective compared to drug-based medical treatments and can have much greater efficacy than certain medical interventions, such as irritable bowel syndrome, and needs less technology than other approaches," he said.

WSU offers two graduate courses in hypnosis, which are oriented to research and practice. Students enrolled in the American Psychological Association-accredited doctorate program in counseling psychology have the option to use their skills at the university counseling center in their second year of practicum, Arreed said. "Half of the medical schools offer hypnosis courses, but physicians don't have the time or psychological training to use it with their patients in most cases," he said.

Barabasz, who is also editor of the International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis and recent president of both the Society for Psychological Hypnosis of the American Psychological Association and the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis, is now preparing the second volume of "Hypnotherapeutic Techniques," to be published by Routledge

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