Verum - Foundation for Behaviour and Environment

ABSTRACT It may be that individuals who are interested in hypnosis will volunteer for hypnosis experiments or practice hypnosis. Do these “hypnosis-prone” individuals differ from hypno-neutral, nonhypnosis-prone individuals? If so, could one speak of a personality type, the homo hypnoticus? This study reports on 3 samples of individuals where there was no indication of hypnosis or no interest in hypnosis (NONHYP: N = 1426) and 4 samples of individuals who were interested in hypnosis (HYP: N = 1048). Using the Personality Styles and Disorders Inventory, we calculated contrast analyses for the contextual effect of HYP vs. NONHYP and gender effects. Results suggested there may be a homo hypnoticus personality style with the characteristics of intuitive-schizotypal, rhapsodic-optimistic, and charming-histrionic. These distinctions appear mostly in women.

Universal Mobile Telecommunication System (UMTS) was recently introduced as the third generation mobile communication standard in Europe. This was done without any information on biological effects and genotoxic properties of these particular high-frequency electromagnetic fields. This is discomforting, because genotoxic effects of the second generation standard Global System for Mobile Communication have been reported after exposure of human cells in vitro. Human cultured fibroblasts of three different donors and three different short-term human lymphocyte cultures were exposed to 1,950 MHz UMTS below the specific absorption rate (SAR) safety limit of 2 W/kg. The alkaline comet assay and the micronucleus assay were used to ascertain dose and time-dependent genotoxic effects. Five hundred cells per slide were visually evaluated in the comet assay and comet tail factor (CTF) was calculated. In the micronucleus assay 1,000 binucleated cells were evaluated per assay. The origin of the micronuclei was determined by fluorescence labeled anticentromere antibodies. All evaluations were performed under blinded conditions. UMTS exposure increased the CTF and induced centromere-negative micronuclei (MN) in human cultured fibroblasts in a dose and time-dependent way. Incubation for 24 h at a SAR of 0.05 W/kg generated a statistically significant rise in both CTF and MN (P = 0.02). At a SAR of 0.1 W/kg the CTF was significantly increased after 8 h of incubation (P = 0.02), the number of MN after 12 h (P = 0.02). No UMTS effect was obtained with lymphocytes, either unstimulated or stimulated with Phytohemagglutinin. UMTS exposure may cause genetic alterations in some but not in all human cells in vitro.