Can Hypnotherapy Increase Well-Being?

Abstract

ABSTRACT Emotional well-being is a broad term that refers to happiness, positive social relationships, life balance, and the pursuit of positive goals. Further, emotional well-being has been shown to reduce risk of death by nearly 20% (Cohen, et al., 2016). The lead article (Na et al., 2022) explores this issue and reports on a pilot study of hypnotic relaxation therapy for well-being (HRT-WB). Their findings demonstrate that 71% of participants achieved high levels of well-being or flourishing. In addition to this innovative study, several articles are included that increase access to scales that measure hypnotizability in French (Apelian, 2022), Russian (Kvitchasty 2022), and Spanish (Muñiz et al., 2022). Kasos et al. 2022 explore the role of hypnotizability in regard to skin conductance orienting response (SCR) in response to differing types of suggestions. Finally, Cordi and Rasch (2022) explore the role of hypnotizability in accurate perception of sleep, with findings suggesting sleep depth may be associated with slow wave sleep and interoceptive ability of accurately perceive sleep depth depending on hypnotizability. Together, these studies identify new applications of clinical hypnosis, increase the availability of scales to measure hypnotizability across cultures, and further understanding of hypnotizability.