"With the way the researchers set up the study, they have found differences between people who go to past-life therapists vs. people who do not. That provides an obvious explanation for some of the differences; for instance, the SCL-90 scores in people going in for treatment of any kind would be expected to be higher than those in people who do not. If someone wants to look at the characteristics of people who have purported past-life memories under hypnosis vs. those who don't, the way to design the study would be to recruit subjects and then hypnotize them. You could then compare people who got images under hypnosis that they believe are actual memories, those who got images but do not believe they are actual memories, and those who didn't get any images under hypnosis. Some of the features the authors looked at in this study such as dissociation and fantasy-proneness may simply be characteristics of good hypnotic subjects, and having the three groups I mentioned would differentiate good hypnotic subjects who believe they retrieved past-life memories vs. those who do not. I suspect that the false fame illusion would be different in those two groups, but there is no way to tell without doing the study."