MEASUREMENT OF RESPONSES TO SUGGESTIONS FORRELAXATION BY MEANS OF INDIRECT AND DIRECT TESTS

摘要

First, some analytic characterizations of suggestibility as well as a brief summary ofrecent developments of tests and scales for suggestibility without hypnosis are provided.Following that summary, an empirical study on the development of a relaxation tool bothfor induction and measurement is described that does not make use of the terms 'sug-gestion' and 'hypnosis'. The objective was to measure suggestibility and relaxation thatmay correlate to these two approaches. This instrument consists of indirect motor itemswhich are supposed to induce relaxation in an implicit manner and mental items inducingrelaxation in an explicit way. In order to assess its psychometric quality this scale wasadministered to 177 school children (aged between 10 and 21 years). Item difficulties,item-total-correlations and reliability had satisfactory psychometric qualities. The cor-relation between these scales was moderate (r = 0.37). Finally, the strategy for furtherdevelopment of the scales is outlined.