Mommy and I are one

"Mommy and I are one" is a phrase that is claimed to be an effective subliminal message to aid in self motivation. The efficacy of complicated subliminal messages such as this is much disputed, however.

Theory

The use of this phrase is propounded in a paper by Lloyd Silverman and Joel Weinberger in 1985, entitled "MOMMY AND I ARE ONE: Implications for psychotherapy", published in the American Psychologist.

According the Silverman and Weinberger, this phrase works because "there are powerful unconscious wishes for a state of oneness with `the good mother of early childhood' ... and gratification of these wishes can enhance adaptation."

Silverman and Weinberger say that:

• Neutral subliminal messages, such as "people are walking," have no effect on subjects.
• Disturbing messages, such as "Destroy Mother," have a negative effect.
• In areas where the usual term for mother is something different, such as "Mama" rather than "Mommy," the phrase "Mommy and I are one" has no effect.

Some follow-up work has claimed that in a game of darts, the phrase "It's OK to beat dad" improved scores.

Criticism

This has been met with considerable skepticism in the scientific community. In general, subliminal messages have not found to have been effective. "Mommy and I are one" is a fairly complicated phrase that seems to require cognition to process, unlike a visceral image of bear or simply the word "enemy." A report from The Scientific Review of Mental Health Practice said:

Numerous studies had previously demonstrated semantic activation of single words under conditions in which subjects had no phenomenal awareness of the stimulus, as we noted in our reviews. However, no priming study had shown that multiple words, presented subliminally were capable of semantic activation... A recent study by Draine (1997) has cast considerable doubt on the proposition that multiple words presented subliminally can be comprehended. In his work, Draine established that priming effects of word pairs are a function of individual word meanings, rather than their combined meaning. For example, the pair of words "Not Dirty" was perceived to be evaluatively negative. The impact of the prime was uninfluenced by its negation. Draine concluded that two-word grammatical combinations are beyond the analytic powers of unconscious cognition. (see also Greenwald and Liu, 1985). 1

Additionally, there has not been much success in replicating these results, casting doubt on the validity of the initial studies.

External links

• MOMMY AND I ARE ONE: Implications for psychotherapy.
• An Update on Subliminal Influence, from the Science & Pseudoscience Review in Mental Health (critical view)
• The phrase MOMMY AND I ARE ONE found hidden in the ROM of an Atari 7800 cartridge

There are strong supportive evidence for the efficacy of the MOMMY AND I ARE ONE message. Two meta-analyses were published in 1990 in major peer reviewed journals (Hardaway in Psychological Bulletin and Weinberger and Hardaway in Clinical Psychology Review). The results of these meta-analyses indicated that the message did yield reliable effects. A meta-analysis takes all studies in an area and does a statistical analysis on the total results. The meta-analyses on MOMMY AND I ARE ONE indicated that The Effects are reliable, of reasonable size, did not depend upon who conducted the study, and were unlikely to be a result of biased reporting of positive results. It appears that something is happening when this message is flashed.