Discovery Lab Answers

Nancy L. Zingrone, PhD

Nancy L. Zingrone, PhD is a research scholar and historian of parapsychology whose work spans experimental psi research, spontaneous anomalous experiences, and the historiography of the field. She was a long-time collaborator with Carlos S. Alvarado at the University of Virginia’s Division of Perceptual Studies, and the sources retrieved for this question place much of her published output in a historical, review, and editorial register rather than in bench experimentation.

Experiments

The retrieved sources document Zingrone chiefly as a historian, reviewer, and co-author of survey and case-research analyses rather than as the runner of controlled psi experiments.

• Spontaneous ESP and Ian Stevenson. With Alvarado, she co-authored an essay examining Ian Stevenson’s decision to focus on spontaneous ESP cases despite Louisa E. Rhine’s view that only controlled laboratory experiments could validly evidence psi ^[5]. The essay argued that Stevenson’s spontaneous-case work provided a counterweight to parapsychology’s laboratory emphasis ^[5].
• Out-of-body experience surveys. The ESP-Nexus pages for Alvarado and Kathy S. Dalton describe survey and correlational work on out-of-body experiences in which Zingrone participated — Alvarado and Zingrone’s surveys of Spanish- and English-speaking populations documenting OBE incidence and phenomenology, and Dalton’s collaboration with Alvarado and Zingrone examining OBE, personality, and altered-consciousness correlates in creative populations. These are described on the site’s synthesis pages rather than carried in the numbered primary sources here.
• Historiography of mediumship and psychology. She co-authored, with Alvarado, Fátima Regina Machado, and Wellington Zangari, a paper on the historical influence of mediumship on psychological and psychiatric ideas ^[6], and contributed to a historical paper on Ambroise-Auguste Liébeault and mental suggestion in the Nancy school of hypnosis ^[3].
• Editorial and review work. The retrieved sources include a co-authored obituary of Eileen Coly ^[1], a book review of Chris Carter’s Parapsychology and the Skeptics ^[2], and contributions to a multi-author book-review set in the Journal of Scientific Exploration ^[4].

Methodology

The retrieved sources do not lay out experimental protocols — randomization, blinding, pre-specified analyses — for studies Zingrone personally designed and ran. Her methodological contribution as documented here is instead argumentative and historiographical: in the Stevenson essay she and Alvarado made a case for the methodological legitimacy of rigorous field and spontaneous-case investigation as a complement to laboratory ESP work ^[5]. In her review of Carter she engaged an attribution-methodology point directly, noting that a 1940 publication should be credited to Pratt as first author along with Rhine, Smith, Stuart, and Greenwood, and therefore not to Rhine alone ^[2]. For the OBE survey work described on the Alvarado and Dalton pages — sample sourcing, instruments used — the numbered sources here do not carry the design details.

Data

The numbered sources retrieved for this question are largely reviews, essays, obituaries, and historical papers, and they do not report trial counts, hit rates, effect sizes, z, or p values from experiments Zingrone conducted. One statistic appears in the multi-author book-review set she contributed to, but it belongs to a study under review, not to her own work: in a review discussing associative remote viewing, subjects had a 62.9% hit rate and raised $25,000 for charity through market predictions ^[4] — that figure is attributed there to Targ and Harary’s work, not to Zingrone. No structured evidence table accompanies this question, and the retrieved excerpts do not show her own experimental data; that absence is a property of these excerpts, not necessarily of her full record.

Skeptical critiques

The sources retrieved for this question do not include published criticism of Zingrone’s own research. What they do show is Zingrone herself operating on both sides of the skeptical exchange: in her review of Chris Carter’s Parapsychology and the Skeptics she raised specific criticisms of the book even while calling it a masterful work, including the attribution correction noted above regarding the 1940 Pratt-led publication ^[2]. That is Zingrone as reviewer, not a critic writing about her — so it does not constitute skeptical engagement with her work.

For more, see her profile at Nancy L. Zingrone, PhD, and the closely linked pages for Carlos S. Alvarado, PhD and Kathy S. Dalton, PhD.