Devin B. Terhune

King's College London | KCL · Department of Psychology

The neurophysiological bases of mind wandering (MW)—an experiential state wherein attention is disengaged from the external environment in favour of internal thoughts—and state meta‐awareness are poorly understood. In parallel, the relationship between introspection confidence in experiential state judgements and neural representations remains uncl...

Timing behaviour and the perception of time are fundamental to cognitive and emotional processes in humans. In non-human model organisms, the neuromodulator dopamine has been associated with variations in timing behaviour, but the connection between variations in dopamine levels and the human experience of time has not been directly assessed. Here,...

The resurgence of interest in psychedelics has led to their widespread, and often uncritical, promotion within both popular media and scientific communities. This heightened enthusiasm complicates assessments of the neurocognitive effects of psychedelics as well as their efficacy as adjuncts to psychotherapy. A key challenge for this nascent field...

Objective Dissociative states, characterised by discontinuities in awareness and perception, occur in a diverse array of psychiatric disorders and contexts. Dissociative states have been modeled in the laboratory through various induction methods but relatively little is known about the efficacy and comparability of different experimental methods....

Most mind wandering (MW) paradigms use self-reports following task performance, but the extent to which these reports are confounded by performance cues is unknown. In two experiments, we examined whether self-reports and confidence therein are influenced by performance indicators during visual metronome response tasks. In Experiment 1, we found th...

Trait responsiveness to verbal suggestions (suggestibility) is relevant to a diverse array of clinical and experimental psychological phenomena. An unresolved question is whether different forms of suggestibility, such as direct verbal suggestibility and indirect (interrogative and sensory) suggestibility, comprise a uniform, superordinate trait or...

Functional neurological disorder (FND) is a common and disabling condition at the intersection of neurology and psychiatry. Despite remarkable progress over recent decades, the mechanisms of FND are still poorly understood and there are limited diagnostic tools and effective treatments. One potentially promising treatment modality for FND is virtua...

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0294805.].

The fairness of decisions made at various stages of the publication process is an important topic in meta-research. Here, based on an analysis of data on the gender of authors, editors and reviewers for 23,876 initial submissions and 7,192 full submissions to the journal eLife, we report on five stages of the publication process. We find that the b...

Nocebo responding involves the experience of adverse health outcomes in response to contextual cues. These deleterious responses impact numerous features of mental and physical health but are characterized by pronounced heterogeneity. Suggestion is widely recognised as a contributing factor to nocebo responding but the moderating role of trait resp...

Dissociation is a phenomenon characterised by a disconnection or detachment from one’s thoughts, identity, consciousness, or surroundings, and can manifest in various psychiatric disorders. Existing measures of dissociation vary considerably in quality and psychometric properties. A comprehensive systematic review of these measures is lacking. This...

Ayahuasca is a psychedelic plant brew originating from the Amazon rainforest. It is formed from two basic components, the Banisteriopsis caapi vine and a plant containing the potent psychedelic dimethyltryptamine (DMT), usually Psychotria viridis. Here we review the history of ayahuasca and describe recent work on its pharmacology, phenomenological...

Abstract Background and aims Clinical hypnosis is supported by evidence of effectiveness for children’s procedural pain and distress. However, systematic reviews of hypnosis for children’s procedural pain and distress focus on oncology and needle procedures and lack in other paediatric contexts. To address this gap, this scoping review maps the evi...

Bodily awareness arises from somatosensory, vestibular, and visual inputs but cannot be reduced to these incoming sensory signals. Cognitive factors are known to also impact bodily awareness, though their specific influence is poorly understood. Here we systematically compared the effects of sensory (bottom-up) and cognitive (top-down) manipulation...

Some amputees have been famously reported to perceive facial touch as arising from their phantom hand. These referred sensations have since been replicated across multiple neurological disorders and were classically interpreted as a perceptual correlate of cortical plasticity. Common to all these and related studies is that participants might have...

This issue of BJPsych Advances includes an article on the use of hypnotherapy in psychiatric practice. The article contains a number of errors and misconceptions regarding the characteristics and practice of hypnosis that we address in this commentary.

Background: Children undergoing medical procedures commonly experience pain and distress, that, if inadequately treated, expose them to acute and chronic biopsychosocial impairments. Clinical hypnosis is promising to address children’s procedural pain and distress, based on evidence of effectiveness and potential superiority to other psychological...

One of the ongoing controversies in interval timing concerns whether human time perception relies on multiple distinct mechanisms. This debate centres around whether subsecond and suprasecond timing may be attributed to a single semi-uniform mechanism or separate and interacting mechanisms. Whereas past studies offer valuable insights, this study o...

Recent theoretical work embedded within the predictive processing framework has proposed that the neurocognitive and therapeutic effects of psychedelics are driven by the modulation of priors (Carhart-Harris & Friston, 2019). We conducted pre-registered re-analyses of previous research (Yanakieva et al., 2019) to examine whether microdoses of lyser...

Characterizing the neurochemical systems involved in responsiveness to hypnotic suggestions has the potential to advance our understanding of the neurocognitive bases of verbal suggestion but also to develop novel interventions for enhancing responsiveness to suggestions in clinical and experimental contexts. In this chapter, we draw on pharmacolog...

Dopaminergic signaling in the striatum has been shown to play a critical role in the perception of time. Decreasing striatal dopamine efficacy is at the core of Parkinson’s disease (PD) motor symptoms and changes in dopaminergic action have been associated with many comorbid non-motor symptoms in PD. We hypothesize that patients with PD perceive ti...

Background: Depersonalization-derealization disorder (DDD) is a dissociative disorder encompassing pronounced disconnections from the self and from external reality. As DDD is inherently tied to a detachment from the body, dance/movement therapy could provide an innovative treatment approach. Materials and methods: We developed two online dance...

Dissociative symptoms, which are characterised by a disruption between normally integrated cognitive-perceptual systems, and suggestion effects, such as changes in awareness, perception and behaviour in response to verbal suggestions, are historically intertwined and long believed to share a family resemblance.1 This association continues to figure...

Bodily awareness is informed by both sensory data and prior knowledge. Although misleading sensory signals have been repeatedly shown to affect bodily awareness, only scant attention has been given to the influence of cognitive variables. Hypnotic suggestion has recently been shown to impact visuospatial and sensorimotor representations of body-par...

Objective: Pain and distress are common in children undergoing medical procedures, exposing them to acute and chronic biopsychosocial impairments if inadequately treated. Clinical hypnosis has emerged as a potentially beneficial treatment for children's procedural pain and distress due to evidence of effectiveness and potential superiority to othe...

W judgments are a widely used intention timing awareness estimate. These judgments are typically obtained by using the classic Libet-style paradigm whereby participants are asked to estimate the time they become aware of their intention to act by using the location of a rotating object on a clock face. There is an inconsistency in the Libet clock p...

Direct verbal suggestibility refers to the capacity for an individual to experience perceptual, motor, affective and cognitive changes in response to verbal suggestions. Suggestibility is characterized by pronounced, yet reliable, inter-individual differences. Previous research and theoretical considerations suggest that greater impulsivity and com...

Symptoms associated with environmental factors (SAEF; also known as idiopathic environmental intolerance) include the presentation of various common symptoms that are causally attributed to normally benign environmental triggers, such as electromagnetic fields, odors, and chemicals. SAEF are typically conceptualized as psychogenic in origin, and mu...

Recent primate studies suggest a potential link between pupil size and subjectively elapsed duration. Here, we sought to investigate the relationship between pupil size and perceived duration in human participants performing two temporal bisection tasks in the subsecond and suprasecond interval ranges. In the subsecond task, pupil diameter was grea...

Hypnosis involves the use of verbal suggestion to modulate behaviour and experience. Hypnosis and imagination have long been associated and the view that hypnotic suggestion effects changes in experience through imagination is a persistent one. In this review, we first present a brief overview of hypnosis and then turn to its potential relationship...

Rationale A significant obstacle to an improved understanding of pathological dissociative and psychosis-like states is the lack of readily implemented pharmacological models of these experiences. Ketamine has dissociative and psychotomimetic effects but can be difficult to use outside of medical and clinical-research facilities. Alternatively, nit...

The dissociative disorders and germane conditions are reliably characterized by elevated responsiveness to direct verbal suggestions. However, it remains unclear whether atypical responsiveness to suggestion is similarly present in depersonalization-derealization disorder (DDD). 55 DDD patients and 36 healthy controls completed a standardised behav...

W judgments are a widely used intention timing awareness estimate. These judgments are typically obtained by using the classic Libet-style paradigm whereby participants are asked to estimate the time they become aware of their intention to act by using the location of a rotating object on a clock face. There is an inconsistency in the Libet clock p...

Sensory perception, motor control, and cognition necessitate reliable timing in the range of milliseconds to seconds, which implies the existence of a highly accurate timing system. Yet, partly owing to the fact that temporal processing is modulated by contextual factors, perceived time is not isomorphic to physical time. Temporal estimates exhibit...

Bodily awareness is informed by both sensory data and prior knowledge. Although misleading sensory signals have been repeatedly shown to affect bodily awareness, only scant attention has been given to the influence of cognitive variables. Hypnotic suggestion has recently been shown to impact visuospatial and sensorimotor representations of body-par...

Elevated responsiveness to verbal suggestions is hypothesized to represent a predisposing factor for dissociative disorders (DDs) and related conditions. However, the magnitude of this effect has not been estimated in these populations nor has the potential moderating influence of methodological limitations on effect size variability across studies...

Accumulating evidence suggests that individuals with greater executive resources spend less time mind wandering. Independent strands of research further suggest that this association depends on concentration and a guilty�dysphoric daydreaming style. However, it remains unclear whether this association is specifc to particular features of executive...

Temporal binding refers to the subjective temporal compression between actions and their outcomes. It is widely used as an implicit measure of sense of agency, that is, the experience of controlling our actions and their consequences. One of the most common measures of temporal binding is the paradigm developed by Haggard, Clark and Kalogeras (2002...

Research on the efficacy of hypnosis applications continues to grow, but there remain major gaps between the science and clinical practice. One challenge has been a lack of consensus on which applications of hypnosis are efficacious based on research evidence. In 2018, 6 major hypnosis organizations collaborated to form the Task Force for Establish...

Symptoms attributed to environmental factors (SAEF; also known as idiopathic environmental intolerance) includes the presentation of various common symptoms that are causally attributed to normally benign environmental triggers, such as electromagnetic fields (EMF), odours, and chemicals. SAEF are typically conceptualized as psychogenic in origin a...

Elevated responsiveness to verbal suggestions following a hypnotic induction is hypothesized to represent a predisposing factor for dissociative disorders (DDs) and germane conditions. However, the magnitude of this effect has not been estimated in these populations nor has the potential moderating influence of methodological limitations on effect...

Background Burns and related procedures are painful and distressing for children, exposing them to acute and chronic sequelae that can negatively affect their physiological, psychological, and social functions. Non-pharmacological interventions such as distraction techniques are beneficial adjuncts to pharmacological agents for procedural pain, sta...

The perception of time is characterized by pronounced variability across individuals, with implications for a diverse array of psychological functions. The neurocognitive sources of this variability are poorly understood, but accumulating evidence suggests a role for inter-individual differences in striatal dopamine levels. Here we present a pre-re...

Bodily awareness arises from somatosensory, vestibular, and visual inputs but cannot be reduced to these incoming sensory signals. Cognitive factors are known to also impact bodily awareness, but their specific influence is poorly understood. Here we systematically compared the effects of sensory (bottom-up) and cognitive (top-down) manipulations o...

Hypnotic suggestibility denotes a capacity to respond to direct verbal suggestions in an involuntary manner. Most research on responsiveness to hypnotic suggestions has focused on highly suggestible individuals but it remains unclear whether these individuals constitute a discrete subgroup (taxon) characterized by a distinct mode of responding from...

Mounting evidence suggests an association between aberrant sleep phenomena and dissociative experiences. However, no wake-sleep boundary theory provides a compelling explanation of dissociation or specifies its physiological substrates. We present a theoretical account of dissociation that integrates theories and empirical results from multiple lin...

The dissociative disorders and germane conditions are reliably characterized by elevated responsiveness to direct verbal suggestions. However, it remains unclear whether atypical responsiveness to suggestion is similarly present in depersonalization-derealization disorder (DDD). 55 DDD patients and 36 healthy controls completed a standardised behav...

The perception of time is characterized by pronounced variability across individuals, with implications for a diverse array of psychological functions. The neurocognitive sources of this variability are poorly understood but accumulating evidence suggests a role for inter-individual differences in striatal dopamine levels. Here we present a pre-reg...

Objective: Preliminary research suggests that experiences resembling synaesthesia are frequently reported under the influence of a diverse range of chemical substances although the incidence, chemical specificity, and characteristics of these effects are poorly understood. Methods: Here we surveyed recreational drug users and self-reported devel...

Background Some amputees have been prominently reported to perceive touch applied to their face as coming from their phantom hand. These referred sensations have been classically interpreted as the perceptual correlate of cortical remapping of the face into the neighbouring missing- hand territory in primary somatosensory cortex (S1). We investigat...

Despite advancements in care and high prevalence of burns injuries, procedural pain, anxiety, and itch due to burns and related treatments can still be inadequately treated. In addition to adaptability to varied settings and populations, hypnotherapy can address multiple pain determinants and is supported by evidence of effectiveness and potential...

State-dependent network models of sub-second interval timing propose that duration is encoded in states of neuronal populations that need to reset prior to a novel timing operation to maintain optimal timing performance. Previous research has shown that the approximate boundary of this reset interval can be inferred by varying the inter-stimulus in...

Although responsiveness to hypnotic suggestions (hypnotizability) typically is conceptualized and studied as a singular homogeneous capability, numerous lines of evidence suggest instead that it is a hierarchically structured cognitive capacity comprising a core superordinate ability and ancillary subordinate component abilities. After reviewing cu...

Editorial decision-making is a fundamental element of the scientific enterprise. We examined whether contributions to editorial decisions at various stages of the publication process is subject to gender disparity, based on analytics collected by the biomedical researcher-led journal eLife. Despite efforts to increase women representation, the boar...

Objectives Hypnotherapy is promising as a psychological adjunct to pharmacological agents for children’s post-burn procedural pain, state anxiety and itch. Research indicates that hypnotherapy can be conducted in varied settings and populations; and has superiority to other psychological interventions for children’s procedural pain and state anxiet...

Objectives Hypnotherapy is promising as a psychological adjunct to pharmacological agents for children’s post-burn procedural pain, state anxiety and itch. Research indicates that hypnotherapy can be conducted in varied settings and populations; and has superiority to other psychological interventions for children’s procedural pain and state anxie...

Objective: Depersonalization–derealization disorder (DDD) is characterized by diverse symptomatology overlapping with anxiety and dissociative disorders, but the sources of this variability are poorly understood. This study aims to determine whether symptom heterogeneity is attributable to the presence of latent subgroups. Method: We applied laten...

Objective: Reliably identifying good placebo responders has pronounced implications for basic research on, and clinical applications of, the placebo response. Multiple studies point to direct verbal suggestibility as a potentially valuable predictor of individual differences in placebo responsiveness, but previous research has produced conflicting...

Objective Preliminary research suggests that experiences resembling synaesthesia are frequently reported under the influence of a diverse range of chemical substances although the incidence, chemical specificity, and characteristics of these effects are poorly understood. Methods Here we surveyed recreational drug users and self-reported developmen...

Grapheme-colour synaesthesia is a neurodevelopmental condition wherein perception of numbers and letters consistently and involuntarily elicits concurrent experiences of colour photisms. Accumulating evidence suggests that heterogeneity in the visuospatial phenomenology of synaesthesia is attributable to the operation of top-down processes underlyi...

A diverse array of studies has been devoted to understanding the neurochemical systems supporting responsiveness to hypnotic suggestions, with implications for experimental and clinical applications of hypnosis. However, this body of research has only rarely been integrated and critically evaluated and the prospects for the reliable pharmacological...

The neurophysiological bases of mind wandering (MW) - an experiential state wherein attention is disengaged from the external environment in favour of internal thoughts, and state meta-awareness are poorly understood. In parallel, the relationship between introspection confidence in experiential state judgements and neural representations remains u...

State dependent network models of sub-second interval timing propose that duration is encoded in states of neuronal populations that need to reset prior to a novel timing operation in order to maintain optimal timing performance. Previous research has shown that the approximate boundary of this reset interval can be inferred by varying the intersti...

The most well-established finding gleaned from decades of experimental hypnosis research is that individuals display marked variability in responsiveness to hypnotic suggestions. Insofar as this variability impacts both treatment outcome in therapeutic applications of hypnosis as well as responsiveness to suggestions in experimental contexts, it is...

The manufacturer of the drug product was Onyx Scientific Limited UK, to cGMP standards.

Objective Responsiveness to direct verbal suggestions (suggestibility) has long been hypothesised to represent a predisposing factor for functional neurological disorder (FND) but previous research has yielded conflicting results. The aim of this study was to quantitatively evaluate whether patients with FND display elevated suggestibility relative...

Hypnotic suggestibility denotes a capacity to respond positively to direct verbal suggestions in an involuntary manner in the context of hypnosis. Elucidating the characteristics of this ability has bearing on responsiveness to suggestions in a variety of clinical and non-clinical contexts. A considerable amount of research has focused on a small s...

We present 21 prominent myths and misconceptions about hypnosis in order to promulgate accurate information and to highlight questions for future research. We argue that these myths and misconceptions have (a) fostered a skewed and stereotyped view of hypnosis among the lay public, (b) discouraged participant involvement in potentially helpful hypn...

Grapheme-colour synaesthesia is a neurodevelopmental condition wherein perception of numbers and letters consistently and involuntarily elicits the concurrent experience of a colour photism. Accumulating evidence suggests that heterogeneity in the visuospatial phenomenology of synaesthesia is attributable to the operation of top-down processes unde...

Previous research suggests that response time (RT) patterns in the sustained attention to response task (SART) differentially predict different features of mind wandering but it is unknown how they relate to meta-awareness of attentional states. We applied principal component analysis to blocks of nontarget (go) trials prior to target (no-go) trial...

Objective Responsiveness to direct verbal suggestions (suggestibility) has long been hypothesized to represent a predisposing factor for functional neurological disorder (FND) but previous research has yielded conflicting results. The aim of this study was to quantitatively evaluate whether FND patients display elevated suggestibility relative to c...

Dance/Movement Therapy (DMT) has become an increasingly recognized and used treatment, though primarily used to target psychological and physical wellbeing in individuals with physical, medical, or neurological illnesses. To contribute to the relative lack of literature within the field of DMT for clinical mental health disorders, using a narrative...

Introduction: Predictive coding models propose that high hypnotic suggestibility confers a predisposition to hallucinate due to an elevated propensity to weight perceptual beliefs (priors) over sensory evidence. Multiple lines of research corroborate this prediction and demonstrate a link between hypnotic suggestibility and proneness to anomalous p...