While some researchers found autonomic fear reactions only in contingency-aware subjects, others reported activation of the fear-network independently of contingency awareness [40], [97], [98].
It is already well established that under most conditions, contingency awareness is important for an EC effect to occur.
Although 10 of 11 participants developed contingency awareness (expectancy), we found no conditioning of pain intensity, pain unpleasantness, or flare using a within-subject repeated measures design (ps>.05).
Finally, although stress reactivity was reduced after training, contingency awareness did not yield a differential effect on stress reactivity measured using both self-reports and skin conductance, within and across sessions.
Outcomes included indices of pain-related conditioning such as unconditioned stimulus (US) expectancy and contingency awareness, self-report and physiological measures of pain-related fear, evaluative judgements of conditioned stimulus pleasantness, and muscular and cortical responses.
Tabbert et al. (2006) explicitly investigated the effect of contingency awareness.
Our review also illustrates that there is an ongoing controversy on the role of contingency awareness.
[55, 56] It has been suggested that SCR is closely tied to contingency awareness that may involve activation of the hippocampus, [57] a structure that may be linked to vulnerability for PTSD.
Human fear conditioning has proven to be an excellent paradigm for the study of the independent but interrelated cognitive (e.g., contingency awareness and US-expectancy ratings) and emotional (e.g., fear-potentiation startle responding) expressions of fear learning (e.g., Hamm & Weike, 2005; Soeter & Kindt, 2010; Weike, Hamm, Schupp, Runge, Schroeder & Kessler, 2005).
When we can predict the consequences of our actions, as in a high action-effect contingency block, the awareness of action reflects these predictions.
