Dear Gerald,

You can find some literature about measurement of the skin resistance or brain activity during hypnosis at http://www.burkhard-peter.de , section Forschung and Publications.

Best regards

Ingo

Dear Gerald,

I found GSR to be a reliable and sensitive indicator of nausea reactions while studying verbal aversion (covert sensitization) treatments of alcohol dependent volunteer inpatients at the Augusta Georgia, VA Medical Center in the 1970s. This work, initially described in 1972 and reported in detail in Elkins (1980), provide the initial confirmation that conditioned alcohol aversion are produced by a nausea based aversion therapy. This finding soon was extended to chemical (emetic) aversion therapy by other scientists (Cannon & Baker, 1981: Howard, 2001).

The Elkins (1980) paper, “Covert sensitization treatment of alcoholism: contributions of successful conditioning to subsequent abstinence maintenance”, Addictive Behaviors 02/1980; 5(1): 67-89, can be downloaded as one of my ResearchGate featured publications. It depicts GSR and other psychophysiological recordings across the range of initial demand nausea (intentionally induced nausea) through the treatment goal of conditioned nausea (automatic nausea as a response to imagined alcohol cues).

I was not intentionally inducing hypnosis during these early covert sensitization applications. However, I was obtaining reports of realistic imagined drinking experiences in deeply relaxed patients whose psychophysiological indicators and self-reports of strong nausea were validated by overt behavioral signs of conditioned alcohol aversions/revulsions. I suspected that hypnosis was playing a role in the treatment’s success and soon concluded this to be the case after undertaking hypnosis training. I now am a Washington State certified hypnotherapist and for the past five years have used hypnotic covert sensitization to enhance the psychoactive substance aversions/revulsions of hundreds of Schick Shadel patients in Seattle Washington and, for the past five months, in the new Schick Shadel of Florida facility in the Fort Lauderdale area.

 I firmly believe that my early GSR recordings would be readily replicated via the use of hypnotic covert sensitization. This belief has been reinforced by the use of hypnotic covert sensitization in our recent fMRI confirmation of brain reprograming from pretreatment cue-induced alcohol cravings to post treatment cue-induced alcohol aversions/revulsions via chemical (emetic) aversion therapy. That preliminary fMRI report (Elkins et. al, 2014) is downloadable from ResearchGate.

Gerald, I wish you good success in your work. If you put together a GSR/ hypnosis bibliography and/or obtain GSR/hypnosis data I would appreciate seeing one or both.

Ralph L. Elkins, Ph.D.

Director of Research and Hypnotherapy

Schick Shadel of Florida      

Dear Ralph, thanks for your intensive answer!

Hi,

My Father once did a study in this area which you may enjoy reading:

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8917161

Thanks a lot,

maybe you can send me a PDF of the paper I cluld only read the abstract!

Best

Gerald

I am keen to validate this. I have a simple (homemade) GSR circuit that measures the "resistance".  Please see attached result. I am working to validate it and appreciate any further work done in this area by the all of you

Gunjan Trivedi

www.wellness-space.net

PGR GSR is measured since long times.

What is new on your device?

Best

Gerald