Virginia Tech professor receives award for research on using hypnosis in pain reduction
Helen Crawford of Blacksburg, Va., professor of psychology in the College of Science at Virginia Tech, received the 2003 Ernest R. Hilgard Award for Scientific Excellence from the International Society of Hypnosis.
Crawford researches the neurophysiology of hypnosis, pain control, and attention, and, more recently, the genetic determinants of hypnotizability. She has current projects with scientists in Israel on the genetic determinants of hypnotizability, with colleagues in Austria on emotion and laterality, and with researchers in Romania and Spain on attentional correlates of hypnotizability. She and her colleagues in Israel, for example, have shown that there are genetic underpinnings to hypnotic susceptibility.
Crawford has worked with several physicians in the Blacksburg area and determined that some people could reduce or eliminate experimental pain and, once they learned hypnotic analgesia techniques in the lab, were able to transfer the learned ability to help control their own back pain, lowering their depression and pain and raising their well being, Crawford said. Crawford recently was invited to address the German Pain Society's annual meeting in Aachen, Germany, and the Association for Applied Psychophysiological and Biofeedback's annual meeting in Florida.
Crawford received a B.A. in elementary education from California State University in Fresno, an M.A. in personality and social psychology from the University of California, Davis, and the Ph.D. from the University of California, Davis, in experimental psychology. She is a fellow of the American Psychological Society, the International Organization of Psychophysiology, and the Society for Clinical and Experimental Hypnosis. She is a member of the Society for Neuroscience, the Cognitive Neuroscience Society, the Organization for Human Brain Mapping, the International Society of Hypnosis, the Society for Research on Nicotine and Tobacco, and Sigma Xi. She serves as a consultant to the NIH-sponsored University of Virginia School of Nursing Center for the Study of Complementary and Alternative Therapies and the Veteran's Administration Hospital in Salem, Va.
The College of Science at Virginia Tech gives students a comprehensive foundation in the scientific method. Outstanding faculty members teach courses and conduct research in biology, chemistry, economics, geosciences, mathematics, physics, psychology, and statistics. The college is dedicated to fostering a research intensive environment and offers programs in nano-scale and biological sciences, information theory and science, and supports research centers—in areas such as biomedical and public health sciences, and critical technology and applied science—that encompass other colleges at the university. The College of Science also houses programs in pre-medicine and scientific law.
Founded in 1872 as a land-grant college, Virginia Tech has grown to become the largest university in the Commonwealth of Virginia. Today, Virginia Tech’s eight colleges are dedicated to putting knowledge to work through teaching, research, and outreach activities and to fulfilling its vision to be among the top 30 research universities in the nation. At its 2,600-acre main campus located in Blacksburg and other campus centers in Northern Virginia, Southwest Virginia, Hampton Roads, Richmond, and Roanoke, Virginia Tech enrolls more than 28,000 full- and part-time undergraduate and graduate students from all 50 states and more than 100 countries in 170 academic degree programs.
