15 seminary students who regularly practiced a form of Christian meditation were given the Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI). Electroencephalographic (EEG) signals were recorded and analyzed for percent time alpha during performance of a series of mental arithmetic tasks and also during a period of meditation. Higher scores on the Hypochondriasis scale of the MMPI were...
The relationship between reported mystical experience and present and anticipated patterns of church participation was investigated in an initial sample of 324 persons. A scale to measure reported mystical experience that allowed for a distinction between the report of mystical experience (Factor I) and its religious interpretation (Factor II) was utilized. Each factor differentially related to...
Like many procedures, Transcendental Meditation (TM) proves extremely effective when applied to properly selected cases by informed practitioners. It is not a panacea. In fact, when used indiscriminately, there are clinical indications that the procedure can precipitate serious psychiatric problems such as depression, agitation, and even schizophrenic decompensation.
The relationship between reported religious experience and hypnotic susceptibility was investigated in an initial sample of 96 Ss. The correlation between a measure of reported religious experience and the Harvard Group Scale of Hypnotic Susceptibility was .36 based upon 81 Ss who completed both measures.
Maslow has presented two differing views related to the effects of peak experiences. He first stated that they inevitably had lasting effects but later maintained that peaks may produce no positive benefits beyond the transitory effects of pleasure during the experience itself. From a sample of 83 peaks submitted by 78 college students, 55% of the protocols seemed to record no lasting effects,...
Equivocal evidence exists as to the relationship of dream recall to field independence. Although previous work (Witkin, Dyk, Faterson, Goodenough, & Karp, 1962) showed field independents recalled more, Montgomery and Bone (1970) employing an Identical-figures Task obcained no such relationship. Considering these findings the present scudy was designed to clarify this area both by employing a...
Judges with diverse professional training and experience were asked to discriminate the dreams of hospitalized schizophrenics from those of hospitalized nonschizophrenics, a task which proved to be subjectively and objectively extraordinarily difficult. Performing barely above chance expectation as a group, judges tended to be misled by an invalid assumption that material depicting loss of body...
In a sample of 170 college students, no association was found between the frequency of nightmare occurrences and the fear of death or dying. The degree to which nightmares were remembered was also not associated with the fear of death.
30 heavy psychedelic users were compared with 30 matched controls using the Rosenzweig and Comrey tests. The drug-dependent group demonstrated aberrant personality traits only with respect to increased Hostility. It appears that this propensity is unrelated to degree of drug dependency and may reflect a predisposing state. People who have difficulty handling their aggressive feelings may tend...
Contrast effects in an experiment involving no-drug, placebo, and seven drugs were postulated on the basis of Helson's adaptation level theory. For 250 male opiate addicts, it was expected and found that general subjective experiences peculiar to drugs were smaller for no-drug or placebo conditions when these conditions were administered after rather than before potent drugs such as morphine or...
Frequency of dream recall ( f DR ) correlated with a creativity score on the Remote Associates Test (RAT). This correlation was lowered by anxiety which correlated positively with f DR but negatively with the RAT scores. Control for the biasing effect of anxiety was accomplished by a partial correlation which increased the f DR -RAT correlation.
Based on the frequently reported similarities between creative and psychedelic (drug-induced, consciousness-expansion) experiences, a preliminary study was conducted to explore the effects of psychedelic agents (LSD-25, mescaline) on creative problem-solving ability. Twenty-seven professionally employed males were given a single psychedelic experience in 1 of 7 small groups ( ns = 3 or 4)...
This paper describes responses to a questionnaire about religious and scientific experiences by 26 graduate students in the sciences and 26 students in a theological seminary. There are two principal findings. First, experiences which are interpreted in a religious way are assigned higher polarity scores (taken as a measure of affect) on a modified form of Osgood's semantic differential than...
Preliminary results of a study of psychedelic therapy are reported. Patients receive LSD and mescaline in a supportive setting following intensive preparation. Subjective questionnaire data from 113 patients reveal a high frequency of claimed benefit, low frequency of negative reaction, and a high relation between claimed benefit and reported “greater awareness of ultimate reality” through the...
Cloze analysis was used to assess the “understandability” of the spontaneous speech of a normal S who had received 9 mg. of psilocybin. This drug seemed to exert an enhancing effect within the first 1½ hr., followed quickly by a deterioration in the quality of verbal communication for about the next 2 hr.