The theoretical basis of ideomotor signalling

I know variations of this signalling are traditionally widely used in hypnotherapeutic methods, and also that hypnosis researchers consider it controversial.

Ideomotor signalling is based on the hypothetical principle that organized nonverbal responses can be meaningfully dissociated from verbal ones. The traditional and simplistic explanation is that the conscious ego is engaged in the verbal expression, and that "unconscious" responding is then better reflected in movements that are not guided by awareness. "Ideomotor" was the name of one of the early ttheories of how hypnotic suggestion would lead to muscular aaction without someone being aware that they were controlling a movement.

An explanation that moves closer to more recent academic psychological frameworks might emphasize dissociable mechanisms of procedural and declarative memory systems rather than conscious and unconscious minds.

One recent view of sociocognitive theorists is to assume that much of our movement is not controlled in a fully aware way, and that "ideomotor" phenomena are just the most extreme examples where we become most cognizant that we are not directly controlling a movement. The problem is that this begs the question of what being fully aware of a movement entails, so it leads to philosophical as well as behavioral considerations at our current state of knowledge of how awareness is constructed.

Perhaps the closest thing I know of to a scientific basis for ideomotor signalling was the late Ernest Hilgard's work with "hidden observers" that would signal pain when experimental subjects were declaring that they were not experiencing the pain. Following suggestions for analgesia during hypnosis, the verbal report would be confidently pain free, but the "hidden observer" would signal a pain level proportionate to the actual stimulus being delivered. These experiments are often taken as a kind of canonical support for the use of ideomotor signalling, where clients can respond "from another level of awareness."

There are methodological questions, however, about the demand characteristics and expectancies in these experimental conditions, and what role they play vs. true dissociated intention or knowledge being reflected by the nonverbal responses. The appearance of the "hidden observer" for example does seem to be manipulable to a large degree by changing the conditions of the experiment.

Another line of experimentation around this is responses gained from people under general anesthetic. Some experiments have been said to show that people can ideodynamically signal (procedurally) their knowledge of things that happened to them while anesthetized although they have no (declarative) memory through verbal reports that they have any memories of that period.

This suffers from similar problems that it isn't clear what actually goes away when someone is put to sleep chemically, and whether the signalling is really demonstrating a dissociation of procedural and declarative memory, or perhaps it is the conditions of the questioning rather than the nature of the signalling that make the difference.

For clinical purposes, what seems to work is used. There is unfortunately always a gap between what works in practice and the ability to explain it satisfactorily. There's always a game of catch-up going on, where weird therapies go in and out of style, and by the time researchers begin to get a handle on why and where they work best, they are replaced by a new crop.

kind regards,

Todd

Replies:

Re:The theoretical basis of ideomotor signalling, by , 01/22/02 Re:The theoretical basis of ideomotor signalling, by Lindsay Smith, 01/22/02 Re:The theoretical basis of ideomotor signalling, by Todd, 01/22/02

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