Story of Psychology - Morton Hunt [426]
The committee, however, found no scientifically acceptable evaluations of the effectiveness of NLP, since, as it said, “the proprietors, purveyors, and practitioners of NLP are not experimentalists and are not interested in conducting such studies.” The evidence of the few halfway credible studies that exist “is either neutral or negative…Overall, there is little or no empirical evidence to date to support either NLP assumptions or NLP effectiveness.”
Quite possibly, the committee added, some aspects of NLP do have some merit; maintaining eye contact with another person and paying close attention to his or her choice of topics and metaphors may well make for better communication. But the committee found that these possibly effective aspects of NLP are neither peculiar to it nor related to NLP theory.
Since then, a vast mass of literature about NLP has piled up, almost none of which meets the minimal requirements for scientific validity and most of which is either hard sell or passionate sermonizing. This is not to say that NLP doesn’t work. A good summation was recently offered by Dr. Robert T. Carroll, a philosopher at Sacramento City College:
While I do not doubt that many people benefit from NLP training sessions, there seem to be several false or questionable assumptions upon which NLP is based. Their beliefs about the unconscious mind, hypnosis, and the ability to influence people by appealing directly to the subconscious mind are unsubstantiated… NLP makes claims about thinking and perception which do not seem to be supported by neuro-science… NLP itself proclaims that it is pragmatic in its approach: what matters is whether it works. However, how do you measure the claim “NLP works”?… Anecdotes and testimonials seem to be the main measuring devices. Unfortunately, such a measurement may reveal only how well the trainers teach their clients to persuade others to enroll in more training sessions.97
Biofeedback: This is the use of electronic and other monitoring equipment to provide an individual with information about his or her biological functions, the goal being to train the person to exert voluntary control over processes that are normally involuntary. Among those activities are heart rate, blood pressure, body temperature (particularly of the extremities), and alpha-wave activity.
Typically, a trainee with hypertension will watch a continuous blood pressure readout and in some unspecified way come to associate certain unconscious processes with any observed drop in pressure. After a while, without knowing how he does it, the trainee can voluntarily lower his blood pressure. Similarly, subjects watching monitors of right-brain and left-brain activity learn to increase one and decrease the other, the result being an improvement of such cognitive abilities as mentally solving arithmetic problems. Trainees who learn to reduce tension in specific muscle groups have been able to improve their musical skills, sprinting performance, and hand-eye tracking.
Impressive as this sounds, the committee found that there were serious limitations to the gains achieved through biofeedback. Subjects could not decrease their heart rate under conditions of stress; only two of ten studies on muscle relaxation showed evidence of it and none showed much benefit in stressful situations; control of alpha-wave activity improved performance only on simple cognitive tasks; and body temperature control, potentially valuable in preventing frostbite, did not work except when the subject was in a resting state.
As with other fringe/alternative treatments, biofeedback has a huge literature, much of it unsubstantiated claims, some of it reasonably solid research. A credible up-to-date overall appraisal comes from the Blum Patient and Family Learning Center of the Massachusetts General Hospital:
Biofeedback training as a tool for relaxation and stress reduction enjoyed a brief surge of popularity following its inception in the late 1960s, but exaggerated claims based on poor-quality studies led to a reaction against