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Christopher FrenchGoldsmiths, University of London · Department of Psychology
Christopher French
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Introduction
Skills and Expertise
Publications
Publications (119)
Night-time is a period of great significance for many people who report paranormal experiences. However, there is limited understanding of the associations between sleep variables and seemingly paranormal experiences and/or beliefs. The aim of this review is to improve our understanding of these associations while unifying a currently fragmented li...
Study objectives:
Isolated sleep paralysis is a benign but frightening condition characterised by a temporary inability to move at sleep onset or upon awakening. Despite the prevalence of this condition, little is known concerning its clinical features, associated demographic characteristics, and prevention as well as disruption strategies.
Metho...
Previous studies have found significant associations between paranormal beliefs and sleep variables. However, these have been conducted on a small scale and are limited in the number of sleep variables investigated. This study aims to fill a gap in the literature by investigating paranormal beliefs in relation to a wide range of sleep variables in...
The British False Memory Society (BFMS) is a registered charity founded in 1993 in response to an epidemic of false claims of past childhood sexual abuse by adults in therapy. The accusers believe they have recovered unconscious memories of a hidden past, but scientific and other evidence raise the possibility of false memories or retrospective rea...
OBJECTIVE: Exploding head syndrome (EHS) is a benign sensory parasomnia characterized by the perception of loud noises or a sense of explosion in the head. Few studies have assessed clinical features and little is known about demographic differences or prevention strategies.
PATIENTS/METHODS: A cross-sectional study of 3286 individuals with and 295...
Sleep paralysis is a relatively common but under-researched phenomenon. While the causes are unknown, a number of studies have investigated potential risk factors. In this article, we conducted a systematic review on the available literature regarding variables associated with both the frequency and intensity of sleep paralysis episodes. A total of...
Research suggests that poor sleep quality is related to the occurrence of sleep paralysis, although the precise relationship between these two variables is unknown. This association has generated interest due to the related possibility that improving sleep quality could help to combat episodes of sleep paralysis. To date, studies examining the asso...
In courts in the United Kingdom understanding of memory phenomena is often assumed to be within the ‘common knowledge’ of the average juror. Many studies suggest that this is not a safe assumption, demonstrating that even professional groups sometimes express beliefs that are not in accordance with the scientific consensus. To test this assumption...
Conspiracist beliefs are widespread and potentially hazardous. A growing body of research suggests that cognitive biases may play a role in endorsement of conspiracy theories. The current research examines the novel hypothesis that individuals who are biased towards inferring intentional explanations for ambiguous actions are more likely to endorse...
Sleep paralysis is a relatively common but under-researched phenomenon. In this paper we examine prevalence in a UK sample and associations with candidate risk factors. This is the first study to investigate the heritability of sleep paralysis in a twin sample and to explore genetic associations between sleep paralysis and a number of circadian exp...
This study uses conjuring to investigate the effects of suggestion, social influence, and paranormal belief upon the accuracy of eyewitness testimony for an ostensibly paranormal event. Participants watched a video of an alleged psychic seemingly bending a metal key by the power of psychokinesis. Half the participants heard the fake psychic suggest...
People who believe in the paranormal have been found to be particularly susceptible to the conjunction fallacy. The present research examines whether the same is true of people who endorse conspiracy theories. Two studies examined the association between conspiracist ideation and the number of conjunction violations made in a variety of contexts (n...
Two studies investigated the relationship between inattentional blindness (IB), paranormal belief/experience, absorption, and working memory capacity (WMC). IB refers to the failure to consciously register an unexpected visual stimulus or event when attention is diverted to a different task. Absorption is a highly focused state where individuals ar...
The psychology of conspiracy theory beliefs is not yet well understood, although research indicates that there are stable individual differences in conspiracist ideation - individuals' general tendency to engage with conspiracy theories. Researchers have created several short self-report measures of conspiracist ideation. These measures largely con...
Nine recently reported parapsychological experiments appear to support the existence of precognition. We describe three pre-registered independent attempts to exactly replicate one of these experiments, 'retroactive facilitation of recall', which examines whether performance on a memory test can be influenced by a post-test exercise. All three repl...
While previous research has indicated that the relative efficacy of attentional strategies on pain may be influenced by anxiety sensitivity (AS) and sex, no study appears to have examined this within the context of an emotion-focus versus distraction paradigm. The present study compared the effect of attentional emotion-focus and distraction instru...
From the ancient world to the present day, anomalous experiences - such as apparitions, premonitions, out-of-body and near-death experiences - provide stories that continue to mystify and intrigue. In this lively introduction, the authors investigate what these stories signify, and why some people turn to the paranormal for explanation. From defini...
An online survey was conducted to examine psychological therapists’ experiences of, and beliefs about, cases of recovered memory, satanic/ritualistic abuse, Multiple Personality Disorder/Dissociative Identity Disorder, and false memory. Chartered Clinical Psychologists (n=183) and Hypnotherapists (n=119) responded. In terms of their experiences, Ch...
An everyday example of a distortion of memory is reported. Subjects were presented with a standard clock with numbers represented by Roman numerals. Of the subjects asked to draw the clock from memory, the majority mistakenly represented the four as ‘IV’ rather than as ‘IIII’ The latter represents the standard form of Roman numeral representation u...
Unlabelled:
Although previous research has examined whether the relative effects of distraction and sensory focusing on pain are dependent upon anxiety sensitivity, such research has concentrated primarily on females. Given the increasing emergence of sex differences in pain processing, the current study aimed to examine whether any influence of a...
Sleep paralysis can be a terrifying experience that is suprisingly common. It can involve the inability to move, auditory and visual hallucinations, a strong sense of presence, difficulty breathing, sensations of movement, and intense emotion. The causes and interpretations of sleep paralysis are described in this article, as well as some practical...
This study used an emotional face stroop task to investigate the effects of self-report trait anxiety, social concern (SC), and chronological age (CA) on reaction time to match coloured outlines of angry, happy, and neutral faces (and control faces with scrambled features) with coloured buttons in a community sample of 74 children aged 6-12 years....
Recent research has suggested that a number of environmental factors may be associated with a tendency for susceptible individuals to report mildly anomalous sensations typically associated with "haunted" locations, including a sense of presence, feeling dizzy, inexplicable smells, and so on. Factors that may be associated with such sensations incl...
Previous research has shown that people reporting contact with aliens, known as "experiencers", appear to have a different psychological profile compared to control participants. They show higher levels of dissociativity, absorption, paranormal belief and experience, and possibly fantasy proneness. They also appear to show greater susceptibility to...
Forty participants watched a video of an alleged psychic giving a reading to a client, followed by 1 of 2 versions of a post-reading interview with the client, describing her reaction to the reading. In fact, both the reading and the post-reading interviews were scripted. In one version of the interview, the client incorrectly recalled an item of i...
Anxiety sensitivity, a fear of anxiety-related symptoms, has been associated with a heightened experience of pain, especially within women. The majority of experimental studies investigating this association have relied heavily on the cold pressor technique as a means of pain induction, limiting the generalisability of results. The aim of the curre...
This study used an emotional face stroop task to investigate the effects of self-report trait anxiety, social concern (SC), and chronological age (CA) on reaction time to match coloured outlines of angry, happy, and neutral faces (and control faces with scrambled features) with coloured buttons in a community sample of 74 children aged 6 –12 years....
The current study investigated whether physical anxiety sensitivity (AS) is associated with selective attentional biases to affective stimuli in children. The dot-probe paradigm was used to examine the deployment of attention towards words pertaining to anxiety symptomatology, socially threatening words, and positive words, in samples of 8-10-year-...
The relationship between children's anxiety and cognitive biases was examined in two tasks. A group of 50 children aged 10 to 11 years (mean = 11 years, SD = 3.71 months) was given two tasks. The first tested children's selective attention (SA) to threat in an emotional Stroop task. The second explored facial processing biases using morphed angry-n...
Sleep paralysis consists of a period of inability to perform voluntary movements at sleep onset or upon awakening, either during the night or in the morning. It is classified as an REM (rapid eye movement) sleep parasomnia; that is, an undesirable sleep disturbance that occurs during sleep that is characterised by the kind of rapid eye movements (R...
It is clear that a wide range of situations exist that can potentially lead people to believe that they have experienced the paranormal when in fact they have not. The question regarding possible differences between believers and non-believers in the paranormal in terms of proneness to cognitive biases can now be answered rather more definitively t...
One hundred participants completed a News Coverage Questionnaire concerning personal memories of where they were, what they were doing and who they were with when footage of dramatic news events was first shown on television, as well as asking them to recall details of the footage itself. These news items included four events that are known to have...
Selective attentional biases were examined amongst individuals varying in levels of physical anxiety sensitivity. The dot-probe paradigm was used to examine attention towards anxiety symptomatology, social threat and positive words. Stimuli were presented above (unmasked) and below (masked) the level of conscious awareness. High physical anxiety se...
Three hundred and eighty-six participants were interviewed about their experience of dreams that seem to predict an event in the future, and their belief about whether such dreams can be explained naturally or paranormally. For those without university education, participants who had had a dream that seemed to predict the future (termed experiencer...
Psychologists have studied the accuracy of eyewitness testimony for many decades and, more recently, there has been a great deal of re- search carried out on the topic of false memories. An overview of re- search in these two areas is presented with a particular focus upon the accuracy of reported memories for anomalous experiences. It has been sho...
This experiment examined the viewpoint and other phenomenal characteristics of childhood memories based on both personal recollections and self-knowledge. Participants were asked to provide examples of remember, know, and uncertain memories, and to rate each memory on a number of dimensions. Remembered events were generally viewed from a field pers...
Near-death experiences (NDEs) have become the focus of much interest in the last 30 years or so. Such experiences can occur both when individuals are objectively near to death and also when they simply believe themselves to be. The experience typically involves a number of different components including a feeling of peace and well-being, out-of-bod...
Examination stress is thought to prevent some individuals from reaching their academic potential. Explanations of this relationship include a proneness to ruminate and worry about examinations, as well as a tendency to be more susceptible to distraction. We therefore examined the relative roles that worry and distraction, assessed three months prio...
This study presents two experiments that investigated the relationship between 7- and 10-year-olds' levels of self-report trait anxiety and depression and their visual search for threatening (angry faces) and non-threatening (happy and neutral faces) stimuli.
In both experiments a visual search paradigm was used to measure participants' reaction ti...
Reports of anomalous experiences are to be found in all known societies, both historically and geographically. If these reports were accurate, they would constitute powerful evidence for the existence of paranormal forces. However, research into the fallibility of human memory suggests that we should be cautious in accepting such reports at face va...
High- and low-trait socially anxious individuals classified the emotional expressions of photographic quality continua of interpolated ("morphed") facial images that were derived from combining 6 basic prototype emotional expressions to various degrees, with the 2 adjacent emotions arranged in an emotion hexagon. When fear was 1 of the 2 component...
Many thousands of people around the world firmly believe that they have been abducted by alien beings and taken on board spaceships where they have been subjected to painful medical examination.
Given that such accounts are almost certainly untrue, four areas of neuroscience are considered with respect to possible clues that may lead towards a full...
In this experiment we sought to provide evidence for transliminality from a test of subliminal perception that was disguised as a computerised ESP card-guessing task. It was predicted that highly transliminal individuals would outperform those with low levels of transliminality when given subliminal primes or 'clues' to the correct choice of card,...
The nature of mind-brain relationships and the possibility of life-after-death are some of the most profound issues relating to mankind's place in the universe. The report in today's Lancet by Pim van Lommel and colleagues of near-death experiences (NDEs) in survivors of a cardiac arrest provides intriguing data that are relevant to these issues. T...
Examinations are perhaps one of the main methods of assessment in education. Unfortunately, there are some individuals who are so fearful of such events that performance is impaired. Test anxiety is believed to be the trait that predisposes individuals to react negatively to examinations and tests. One way in which it is believed that test anxiety...
The right of Christopher C. French to be identified as the owner of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved Copyright throughout the world No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photographic, by...
Subjects high and low in test-anxiety were presented with an inferential reasoning task requiring the verification of necessary and unnecessary inferences. The task was performed whilst holding either two or six digits in memory. On the verification task, the performance of high-test-anxious subjects was slower and less accurate than that of the lo...
Eysenck (1992) predicts that among trait-anxious individuals high levels of state anxiety broaden the attentional beam in order to facilitate the detection of threat. An experiment was therefore conducted to investigate the interactive role of trait anxiety and mood manipulation on attentional broadening. Target material varying in threat-relatedne...
The perceptual identification paradigm was used to examine, in 3 experiments, implicit memory performance in 116 high- and low-trait anxious volunteers. A series of threat-related and neutral words was presented in different colors during the encoding phase. Ss were required to encode the stimuli by naming the color while ignoring the semantic cont...
The Self-Deceptive Enhancement and Impression Management scales of the Paulhus (1991) Balanced Inventory of Desirable Responding were correlated with the Psychoticism, Neuroticism, Extraversion, and Lie scales of the Eysenck EPQ-R (Eysenck & Eysenck, 1991) in a student sample. Extraversion correlated positively and Neuroticism correlated negatively...
Recent research has demonstrated that when participants are required to draw from memory a standard clock with numbers represented by Roman numerals, they typically misrepresent the four as "IV" rather than as the correct "IIII." Participants do not make this mistake when they simply copy the clock while it remains in full view. A reanalysis of the...
In recent years there has been increased interest into the nature of worry. While closely related to neuroticism, worry is considered to be a separate construct. However, few studies have been conducted which investigate the combination of factors, in addition to neuroticism, that best predict worry. Using a hierarchical regression procedure, the p...
In this study the authors examined whether increases in children's levels of self-reported trait anxiety would be related to their interpretation of ambiguous stimuli. By using the Revised Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale (C. R. Reynolds & B. O. Richmond, 1985), the authors obtained measurements of anxiety for 40 children ages 7 and 9 years. Inter...
In this study the authors examined whether increases in children's levels of self-reported trait anxiety would be related to their interpretation of ambiguous stimuli. By using the Revised Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale (C. R. Reynolds & B. O. Richmond, 1985), the authors obtained measurements of anxiety for 40 children ages 7 and 9 years. Inter...
Eysenck (1992) argues that high trait-anxious subjects are more likely to show a general susceptibility to distraction in anxious mood states, especially if the distracting material resembles the task stimuli. Unfortunately there is little direct evidence that supports this view. The present experiment therefore attempted to test Eysenck's proposit...
Replicated R. P. Bentall and M. Thompson's (see record 77- 25394) study that selected Ss on the basis of high, medium, and low scores on the Hypomanic Personality Scale ([HPS] M. Eckblad and L. J. Chapman; see record
1987-00117-001). In an emotional Stroop test, high hypomanic Ss showed interference of color naming for depression-related but not e...
This is the author's final draft. The British Psychological Society website for The Psychologist is www.bps.org.uk/publications/thepsychologist This article started life as a review of Test Your Psychic Powers by Susan Blackmore and Adam Hart-Davis (1995). The author of the review, Andrew Colman, felt that one of the issues he wished to raise was n...
French and Richards (1993) found that subjects asked to draw from memory a clock that had Roman numerals on its face typically represented the number four on the clock face as "IV" rather than the correct "IIII", whereas those merely asked to copy it typically drew "IIII". The current experiments followed the methodology of French and Richards, but...
An experiment was conducted to examine processing strategy differences in anxiety. The sentence-picture verification task was modified to incorporate a block of threat-related trials (involving a knife and a rifle) and a block of neutral trials (involving a truck and a chair). It was predicted that the high-trait, relative to low-trait, anxious ind...
High- and low-trait anxious subjects participated in a divided visual field emotional Stroop task. Subjects identified the colour of unilaterally presented threat-related, positive and neutral words. The high- and low-trait groups differed in terms of their accuracy scores but not in their reaction times. Analysis of the accuracy data revealed that...
A previous study conducted in Australia has suggested that persons who believe in and claim experience of the paranormal tend to score higher on measures of manic-depressiveness and magical ideation. The present study sought to confirm these findings in an English sample of 114 university students using as measures of belief in the paranormal the A...
The disambiguation of threat/neutral homophones was investigated in high- and low-trait anxiety subjects who had been exposed
to either a positive or a negative mood manipulation procedure. Subjects were required first to spell each auditorily presented
word and second, to generate and speak a sentence using the word. Difference indices were calcul...
In Study 1 subjects high and low in trait anxiety were asked to identify the colour of anxiety-related, anxiety-matched neutral, happiness-related and happiness-matched neutral words. There were two types of stimulus presentation: blocked trials, where stimuli were blocked with respect to their valence, and mixed trials, where stimuli were mixed wi...
Three experiments are reported comparing high- and low-trait anxious subjects in terms of their patterns of semantic activation in response to ambiguous primes, with one threat-related and one neutral meaning. Such primes were followed by targets related to either their threat or neutral meaning, or by unrelated targets, in a lexical decision task....
In Study 1 subjects high and low in trait anxiety were asked to identify the colour of anxiety-related, anxiety-matched neutral, happiness-related and happiness-matched neutral words. There were two types of stimulus presentation: blocked trials, where stimuli were blocked with respect to their valence, and mixed trials, where stimuli were mixed wi...
At four clinical sites, 188 psychiatric patients were assessed with both the standard auditory verbal digit span test and
a computerised visual digit span test requiring manual response. Correlations between the two test forms were comparable with
other similar studies. Subjects obtained higher scores on the standard version than the computerized v...
The current study provides a further demonstration of population stereotypes in a study ostensibly investigating telepathy. Subjects show a strong tendency to choose certain predictable responses, and this phenomena can be used to create the impression that extrasensory communication has occurred. No correlation was found between the tendency to ch...
Forty subjects performed both of the following tasks. In the imagery task, simple dot patterns were presented for five seconds in free vision, followed by a three second fixation field. Subsequently, a circle was briefly presented in either the right or the left visual field and subjects were required to indicate whether or not the circle surrounde...
Word associations were collected from 300 subjects to a set of homographs, each with at least one threat-related and one neutral meaning, to determine the relative dominance of the different meanings. Twelve independent judges rated each meaning for threat value and also indicated to which meaning they felt each associate was related. The finished...