How completely a thing in front of you can take your attention over — attentional narrowing, imaginative involvement, responsiveness to engrossing stimuli, and what happens to time and to the sense of being a separate observer while it lasts.
What this measures
A disposition for episodes of total attention, in which whatever you are attending to — a piece of music, a landscape, a piece of work, a memory, an image in your head — engages your full representational capacity, and while it lasts the rest of the world is relatively unable to get at you. It is not concentration, which is effortful and deliberate. It is closer to being taken, and it is ordinary: most people have had it, and people differ a great deal in how often and how far.
Absorption is about the stimulus taking you. Expectancy uptake is about the cue telling you what to feel. The sibling exam at /exams/suggestibility measures expectancy uptake — how far you produce the experience a situation implies you should be having, when something or someone has told you what to expect. This one measures absorption — how completely something actually in front of you can take your attention over, with nobody having said anything about it. The difference is where the content comes from: from a suggestion, or from the thing itself. They are related in the literature, and relatedness is not identity: they are separable enough that a body of work exists arguing about how much of one is really the other, which would be a strange argument to have about a single construct.
Both are printed beside experiential results for the same reason: an exam that ends by asking "did you feel it?" is partly measuring the person’s disposition to have felt it. Expectancy uptake is the part of that driven by what the task implied. Absorption is the part driven by how far the person goes in when something engages them. Reporting one and not the other would give half a caveat.
Sit the expectancy uptake index.
Why the items are ours, and the refusals are the design
It is not the Tellegen Absorption Scale and it contains none of its items.The
TAS is licensed through the University of Minnesota Press as one of the eleven primary scales of the
Multidimensional Personality Questionnaire. The evidence is not a missing permission notice but an act
of enforcement: a long-running academic scale library that hosts the Harvard, Stanford and Waterloo
hypnosis scales carries, where the TAS used to be, a line saying it was removed at the publisher’s
request.
MODTAS is not a workaround.It is a rescaling of the same items, and a
derivative of a licensed instrument carries the licence.
We did not paraphrase our way around it.A paraphrase of a licensed item
set is a derivative work. It would also be a lie about provenance, which is the worse of the two
problems.
There was nothing in the public domain to fall back on.The IPIP is
genuinely public domain and is this project’s standing fallback — and its index of 274 labels across
463 scales has no Absorption entry at all. So these fifteen items were written from the published
definition of the construct, and the norms are ours and do not exist yet.
No percentile below 100 takers.Claim class ② is a percentile against a
stated reference class. Under a hundred completed sittings there is no reference class worth the
name, so you are shown your raw score and the count and nothing else.
This result will never be worded as: “You are a high-absorption type.”
The five facets are a shape, not established subscales
The five facets below are how the fifteen items were WRITTEN. They are a description of our intentions, not a finding about the construct. No factor analysis has been run on them, because there is no sample to run one on, and there will not be one for a long time.
And this is not us being coy about a solved problem. And the established instrument does not have a settled answer either. Factor-analytic work on the published absorption scale has proposed a small number of oblique primary factors with a single higher-order factor, six to nine content clusters, and — in the questionnaire revision that carries it — two subscales. Fifty years of work on the same item set has not produced one agreed structure. So "a shape, not established subscales" is not us being coy about a solved problem. It is an unsolved problem, and we are on the honest side of it.
O’Grady, K.E. (1980), The absorption scale: A factor-analytic assessment, International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis 28(3):281–288, doi:10.1080/00207148008409853. Crossref-verified this session.
Radtke, H.L. & Stam, H.J. (1991), The relationship between absorption, openness to experience, anhedonia, and susceptibility, International Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis 39(1):39–56, doi:10.1080/00207149108409617 — factor analyses across two samples reached a conclusion that did not reduce to hypnotic susceptibility. Crossref-verified this session.
Jamieson, G.A. (2005), The Modified Tellegen Absorption Scale, Australian Journal of Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis 33(2):119–139 — reports oblique primary factors plus a higher-order factor. [UNVERIFIED: no DOI could be resolved for this article in Crossref, and the journal is not PubMed-indexed. The citation is corroborated across independent bibliographic listings; the numbers in it are NOT quoted here because we could not read it.]
Your key
Your browser made you a random key. We store a one-way hash of it, never the key. It is the only
thing linking this sitting to your next one — write it down. Without it we cannot delete your
entries later, because we will have no way to know which ones are yours.
…
Before you start
Under a minute. None of it is required, every question can be skipped, and
"prefer not to say" is recorded as itself rather than turned into a default. This is not
part of the exam and nothing here is scored.
Fifteen statements
How often is each of these true of you? There is no good answer and no bad one.
And two short passages
Read each one once, at your own pace, then answer the question under it. The page
times how long you spend; only the difference between your two estimates is used, and neither number
means anything on its own.
Where this comes from
Tellegen, A. & Atkinson, G. (1974), Openness to absorbing and self-altering experiences ("absorption"), a trait related to hypnotic susceptibility, J Abnorm Psychol 83(3):268–277, doi:10.1037/h0036681 — the construct. The scale published with it is LICENSED and is NOT reproduced here, in whole, in part, or in paraphrase.
Council, J.R., Kirsch, I. & Hafner, L.P. (1986), Expectancy versus absorption in the prediction of hypnotic responding, J Pers Soc Psychol 50(1):182–189, doi:10.1037/0022-3514.50.1.182 — the context critique.
Nadon, R., Hoyt, I.P., Register, P.A. & Kihlstrom, J.F. (1991), Absorption and hypnotizability: context effects reexamined, J Pers Soc Psychol 60(1):144–153, doi:10.1037/0022-3514.60.1.144 — N = 475 and N = 434, the pushback. We cite the exchange, not one side.
O’Grady, K.E. (1980), The absorption scale: A factor-analytic assessment, Int J Clin Exp Hypn 28(3):281–288, doi:10.1080/00207148008409853; and Radtke, H.L. & Stam, H.J. (1991), Int J Clin Exp Hypn 39(1):39–56, doi:10.1080/00207149108409617 — why the factor structure of the established instrument is still disputed.
Studerus, E., Gamma, A., Kometer, M. & Vollenweider, F.X. (2012), Prediction of psilocybin response in healthy volunteers, PLoS ONE 7(2):e30800, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0030800 — 23 studies, 409 administrations, 261 volunteers; and Haijen, E.C.H.M. et al. (2018), Front Pharmacol 9:897, doi:10.3389/fphar.2018.00897.
Lush, P., Moga, G., McLatchie, N. & Dienes, Z. (2018), Neurosci Conscious 2018(1):niy006, doi:10.1093/nc/niy006 — CC BY-NC, NOT used here. Its r(66) = .56 objective retest is the ceiling on what anything in this domain may claim.
The rules this page is bound by
Report the measurement, not the category."Your VVIQ score was 19 out of 80. Scores at or below 24 are the range in which most published aphantasia research recruits participants." Never "you have aphantasia."
Name the reference class, every time.A percentile is meaningless without saying among whom. Ours is: among people who found this page and chose to take the test. That group is systematically enriched for exactly the traits being measured, because people who suspect something about themselves go looking.
Consistency, not confidence.For every instrument the second administration is part of the instrument. A one-shot result is a reading, not a finding.
Never route a result to anything consequential.No credential tier, no karma weight, no grant eligibility, no payment. The moment a score buys something, people optimise it and the data dies.