Pilot: does clinical hypnosis training impart the confidence needed to use it?

The clinical hypnosis literature suggests that confidence in new clinical skills is an important learning outcome; however, many current training standards for clinical hypnosis do not address outcomes such as confidence. To address this deficit, this pilot study asked whether clinical hypnosis instruction offered by the American Society of Clinical Hypnosis (ASCH) leads to learner confidence. A one-group observational A-B survey-based design examined baseline, expected, and post-training confidence in the use of skills necessary for clinical hypnosis. Twenty clinicians in attendance at an ASCH Fundamentals Workshop answered Likert-type questionnaire items immediately before and after clinical hypnosis training. The average change in confidence ratings from pre-training to post-training was +0.80, resulting in a significant effect, p = .022, suggesting that such workshops can lead to learner confidence. This work represents initial research on an affective learning objective in clinical hypnosis training, as well as the potential utility and relevance of affective learning objectives in such training. Future researchers may wish to further investigate and formalize this and other affective learning objectives in this discipline.