Neurolinguistic Programming: A Test of the Eye-Movement Hypothesis

Psychological literature reflects little information about neurolinguistic programming. There are even fewer reports of research o n basic tenets. This research investigated one facet, namely, the eye-movement hypothesis of Bandler and Grinder (1975, 1979) who posited that eye movements should indicate the representational system in use by an individual, e.g., visual, auditory, or kinesthetic. Eye movements have been descr~bed elsewhere (Thomason, Arbuckle, & Cady, 1980; Dorn, Atwater, Jereb, & Russell, 1983) . In t h ~ s research 22 undergraduates, whose mean age was 21.6 yr., were asked to respond to a 30-item questionnaire of 1 0 each, visual, auditory, and kinesthetic questions. Subjects' eye movements were videotaped through a one-way mirror and later rated by five naive undergraduates. Values of chi squared, computed individually for each subject, were not significant for eye movements. One analysis indicated that 50% of the rime no movements were discernable and rhat frequencies of eye movements to questions in other modalities were 2 2 % visual, 2 2 9 6 auditory, and 696 kinesthetic. Visual responses were as frequent as auditory responses which is conrrary to the current thinking that visual responses predominate. These results are not consistent with previous research (Thomason, et al., 1980) , except rhat neither project supported the eye-movement hypothesis of neurolinguistic programming. It is questionable whether the chi squared, reported by Thomason, et al. ( 1980) , is appropriate given the assumption of independence of data. Although the developers of neurolinguistic programming reject empirical research (Brady & Biedermann, 1985) , it appears that other controlled studies are warranted.