An experiment with three studies of physiological connectedness amongst twins and its possible relationship to attachment

Abstract

Fourteen pairs of twins were selected on the basis of their high scores on The Exceptional Experiences Questionnaire (EEQ), which documents the frequency and intensity of telepathic and synchronistic experiences amongst twins. The twins alternated in the role of sender in which they were exposed to a surprise or shock stimulus and in the role of receiver in which their electrodermal activity (EDA) was monitored. Sender and receiver were placed in laboratory rooms at remote ends of a building separated by distance and barriers ensuring sensory isolation. Twins in the role of sender were presented with a series of surprise or shock stimuli during the period randomly selected for presentation. This was one out of the 8 periods occurring in the block of 5 min. Within the selected period, the actual presentation lasted 30 s and occurred at approximately the midpoint of the period. The stimulus presentation in this block of 5 min was repeated 5 times making thereby a 25-minute session for each twin belonging to the sender-receiver pair. During this session, the other twin in the role of receiver, had been equipped with electrodes recording EDA and otherwise advised to relax during the session. The task for the judge in the studies was to use the electrophysiological data from the non-shocked twin to identify the exact periods when the stimuli had been exposed to the sending twin. The EDA from 91 useable presentations were displayed and analysed for the purpose of locating any peak EDA response in each of the possible eight periods corresponding to the stimuli exposure times. Correct identifications would thus occur by chance one in eight times. The attempts at these identifications were carried out by GB, a researcher experienced at EDA interpretation but blind as to the periods that had been chosen for the stimulus exposure. The findings from the three experimental studies showed there were 18 correct identifications out of the total 91 stimulus exposures (MCE = 11.4), which reached statistical significance on a one-tailed t-test (p = 0.043), and with a binomial test (p = .03, one-tailed). However, only one of the three studies reached significance, in this case at the same level as the collective results (p = 0.043, one-tailed). Two explanations for this are the observed variability in the task-performances of the pairs of twins and in the differences in the sources of the twins for each of the studies. The results of a questionnaire entitled ‘Experiences in Close Relationships’ (ECR), adapted for twin relationships to assess their degree of attachment, indicated that those twins with many “correct identifications of epochs from the EDA” were not significantly different from the others on this measure of attachment. However, it should be noted that the twins here according to the ECR all had close emotional relationships to each other, thereby giving too little variation to adequately test the hypotheses concerning the role of attachment. The data provides justification for carrying out further studies using this methodology and furthermore that pairs of twins should be used with greater variation in attachment measures. The results are briefly discussed in the context of recent findings concerning the neuropsychology of experiences of synchronicity.