A Comparison of Hypnotic and Nonhypnotic Treatments for Smoking

Three experiments administered variants of Spiegel's (1970) smoking cessation procedure to smokers in hypnotic and nonhypnotic treatments. Followup periods were from twelve to twenty-four weeks depending on the experiment. Complete abstinence was an infrequent outcome in all three experiments. Greater-than-control reductions in smoking for treated subjects were obtained in two of the experiments but, in both cases treatment and control subjects failed to differ significantly before the end of the followup period. Hypnotic and nonhypnotic treatments produced equivalent smoking reductions in all studies, and neither hypnotizability nor questionnaire assessments of motivation to quit correlated significantly with treatment outcome. Implications are discussed.