Suggestibility of Chinese as revealed by the Creative Imagination Scale

Abstract

The current aim of the study is to provide a preliminary view of the suggestibility of Chinese people. Direct hypnotic experience was examined by giving a widely used suggestibility measure, the ‘Creative Imagination Scale’, to 90 volunteer subjects who were randomly drawn from a college in Hong Kong. The Creative Imagination Scale is thought to be a clinically useful assessment, which may reveal some implications for the applications of hypnosis in the Chinese culture. The current results indicated that the distribution of the suggestibility scores of the current Chinese sample tended to be more centralized than the Western counterpart, and that there were some cultural differences in the psychometric features and preferred modalities. By and large, the prospect of using hypnosis in the Chinese population is positive in view of their relatively good susceptibility to hypnotic suggestions. Copyright © 2005 British Society of Experimental and Clinical Hypnosis