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In Pavlovian fear conditioning, contingency awareness provides an indicator of explicit fear learning. A less studied aspect of fear-based psychopathologies and their treatment, awareness of learned fear is a common cause of distress in persons with such conditions and is a focus of their treatment. The present work is a substudy of a broader fear-conditioning fMRI study. Following fear conditioning, we identified a subset of individuals who did not exhibit explicit awareness of the CS-US contingency. This prompted an exploratory analysis of differences in "aware" versus "unaware" individuals after fear conditioning. Self-reported expectancies of the CS-US contingency obtained immediately following fear conditioning were used to differentiate the two groups. Results corrected for multiple comparisons indicated significantly greater BOLD signal in the bilateral dlPFC, right vmPFC, bilateral vlPFC, left insula, left hippocampus, and bilateral amygdala for the CS+>CS- contrast in the aware group compared with the unaware group (all p values ≤ 0.004). PPI analysis with a left hippocampal seed indicated stronger coupling with the dlPFC and vmPFC in the aware group compared with the unaware group (all p values ≤ 0.002). Our findings add to our current knowledge of the networks involved in explicit learning and awareness of conditioned fear, with important clinical implications.

Abstract. The aim of this study was to determine if contingency awareness between the conditioned (CS) and unconditioned stimulus (US) is necessary for concurrent electrodermal and eyeblink conditioning to masked stimuli. An angry woman’s face (CS+) and a fearful face (CS−) were presented for 23 milliseconds (ms) and followed by a neutral face as a mask. A 98 dB noise burst (US) was administered 477 ms after CS+ offset to elicit both electrodermal and eyeblink responses. For the unmasking conditioning a 176 ms blank screen was inserted between the CS and the mask. Contingency awareness was assessed using trial-by-trial ratings of US-expectancy in a post-conditioning phase. The results showed acquisition of differential electrodermal and eyeblink conditioning in aware, but not in unaware participants. Acquisition of differential eyeblink conditioning required more trials than electrodermal conditioning. These results provided strong evidence of the causal role of contingency awareness on differential eyeblink and electrodermal conditioning.

Evaluative conditioning is one of the most widely studied procedures for establishing and changing attitudes. The surveillance task is a highly cited evaluative-conditioning paradigm and one that is claimed to generate attitudes without awareness. The potential for evaluative-conditioning effects to occur without awareness continues to fuel conceptual, theoretical, and applied developments. Yet few published studies have used this task, and most are characterized by small samples and small effect sizes. We conducted a high-powered ( N = 1,478 adult participants), preregistered close replication of the original surveillance-task study (Olson & Fazio, 2001). We obtained evidence for a small evaluative-conditioning effect when “aware” participants were excluded using the original criterion—therefore replicating the original effect. However, no such effect emerged when three other awareness criteria were used. We suggest that there is a need for caution when using evidence from the surveillance-task effect to make theoretical and practical claims about “unaware” evaluative-conditioning effects.

Background and objectivesAddictive behaviors are influenced both by impulsive processes headed toward consumption, and by higher-order, reflective, control-oriented processes. Our objective here was to (i) change automatically-activated action tendencies and explicit attitudes toward alcohol and softdrinks, as well as fat and healthy food through evaluative conditioning (EC) and (ii) investigate the role of contingency awareness in producing an EC effect.MethodsIn the EC conditions, alcohol-related stimuli or fat foods (CS) were associated with negative pictures (US), while stimuli related to softdrinks or healthy foods (CS) were associated with positive pictures (US). In the control conditions, CSs were paired with neutral pictures (US). Measures of explicit attitudes and approach tendencies (AAT) were assessed before and after the EC procedure. Participants (n = 95) then indicated whether they remembered, for each CS, the valence of the associated US.ResultsSignificant EC effects were found on explicit attitudes toward alcohol and marginally significant change on attitudes toward fat foods. The effect on alcohol appeared to depend on awareness of CS-US contingencies. No effects of EC were found on approach tendencies.LimitationsDifficulties to find EC effects on action tendencies can be attributed to structural features of the AAT and strategies during EC.ConclusionsWe conclude that EC alone may not be efficient in reducing addictive behaviors in populations with reduced capacity to process CS-US pairs and for which impulsive behaviors are strong predictors of consumption.

Evaluative conditioning (EC) refers to a modulation in the liking of a neutral stimulus after it has been paired with an unconditioned stimulus (US). Previous studies have uncovered some of the mec...

Evaluative conditioning (EC) changes the preference towards a formerly neutral stimulus (conditioned stimulus; CS), by pairing it with a valent stimulus (unconditioned stimulus; US), in the direction of the valence of the US. When the CS is presented suboptimally (i.e., too briefly to be consciously perceived), contingency awareness between CS and US can be ruled out. Hence, EC effects with suboptimally presented CSs would support theories claiming that contingency awareness is not necessary for EC effects to occur. Recent studies reported the absence of EC with briefly presented CSs when both CS and US were presented in the visual modality, even though the CSs were identified at above-chance levels. Challenging this finding, Heycke et al. (R Soc Open Sci 4(9):160935, 2017) found some evidence for an EC effect with briefly presented visual stimuli in a cross-modal paradigm with auditory USs, but that study did not assess CS visibility. The present study realized a close replication of this study, while deviated from it using different stimuli, introducing a brief practice phase, and adding a CS visibility check. Overall EC for briefly presented stimuli was absent, and results from the visibility check show that an EC effect with briefly presented CSs was only found, when the CSs were identified at above-chance levels.

IntroductionThe recognition of the conditioned-unconditioned stimulus (CS-US) association in classical conditioning is referred to as contingency awareness. The neural underpinnings of contingency awareness in human fear conditioning are poorly understood.ObjectivesWe aimed to explore the EEG correlates of contingency awareness.MethodsHere, we recorded electroencephalography (EEG) from a sample of 20 participants in a semantic conditioning experiment. In the acquisition phase the participants were presented with sequences of words from two semantic categories paired with tactile stimulation followed by presentation of a neutral sound (US-) ((e.g., animals -> left hand vibration -> US-, clothes -> right hand vibration -> US-). In the test phase the association violated in 50% of trials which followed by a presentation of a loud noise (US+). The participants were only instructed to listen carefully. On the basis of self-reported contingency awareness, twenty participants were divided in aware (N=12) and unaware (N=8) group.ResultsThe aware group expressed a non-lateralized effect of alpha-beta (12-23 Hz) suppression along with a more negative CNV at central channels preceding presentation of the vibration (main effect of Group). Also, CNV was more negative in expectation of US+ comparing with expectation of US- in the aware group but not in the unaware group.ConclusionsThe results indicate that contingency awareness is accompanied by neural patterns reflecting expectation as can be seen in the suppression of somatosensory alpha-beta activity before expected presentation of the vibration as well as in CNV in expectation of an aversive event.

We investigate two questions, (1) the relevance of memory for evaluative conditioning (EC) effects based on smell-taste pairings, and (2) the potential preparedness of smell-taste combinations for yielding EC effects. The relevance of memory for EC effects is a subject of intense research. The majority of studies that investigate the memory-EC relation use visual stimuli and typically show no or relatively small EC effects without memory. For smell-taste combinations, only a few studies exist, with mixed results regarding the role of memory in EC. The idea that there might be a preparedness of smell and taste pairings comes from classical conditioning studies showing preparedness in food aversion and from research on joint processing of smells and tastes. In Experiment 1, we report a conceptual replication of previous studies with smell-taste and picture-taste pairings. In this experiment, we found no evidence for memory-independent EC overall. In a pre-registered Experiment 2, we used a design with smells, pictures, tastes, and sounds to test the role of memory more conclusively and test the preparedness hypothesis for smell-taste pairings. The results support the preparedness hypothesis for smell-taste pairings in EC. Furthermore, as in Experiment 1, we did not find evidence for memory-independent EC.

We further extended the use of a microswitch-based program for assessing contingency awareness and promoting locomotion fluency of five adolescents with Rett syndrome. A second goal was to evaluate the effectiveness and the suitability of the rehabilitative intervention on participants’ indices of happiness as outcome measure of their quality of life and on the reduction of their stereotypic behaviors. Finally, a social validation procedure involving 40 parents of children with severe developmental disabilities and 40 caregivers was carried out. The study was conducted according to an ABABCBCB experimental sequence for each participant, with A representing baselines, B indicating the contingent intervention closely linked to the adaptive responding, and C reporting a non-contingent control phase with positive stimulation occurring throughout the session, irrespective of the adaptive behavior. Results showed an improved performance for all the participants during contingent intervention phases. The control phases revealed that all participants acquired the contingency awareness. The indices of happiness increased as sign of an enhanced quality of life. Both groups of raters favorably scored the use of such technology. Clinical, practical, and psychological implications of the findings were discussed.

Consumer research can benefit greatly from more insight into unconscious processes underlying behavior. Williams and Poehlman’s effort at more clearly conceptualizing consciousness and call for more research provides a welcome stimulus in this regard. At the same time, providing evidence for unconscious causation is fraught with methodological difficulties. We outline why it is vital to uphold standards of evidence for claims regarding unconscious processes, as it is precisely a lack of rigor on this front that has generated a countermovement by researchers skeptical of dual-process models in general and unconscious processes in particular. We contend that the skeptics have offered valid causes for concern, which we leverage to formulate six concrete recommendations for future research on consciousness. Researchers should (1) specify the process level at which they claim evidence for unconscious processes, (2) not confuse unconscious influences with unconscious processes, (3) carefully choose between different operational definitions of awareness, (4) maximally satisfy four criteria for awareness measures, and (5) complement measurement with experimental manipulations of awareness. Finally, we recommend to (6) refrain from hard claims about unconscious causation that transcend the limitations of the evidence, recognizing that consciousness is a continuous construct.

The evaluative conditioning (EC) effect refers to the change in the liking of a neutral stimulus (conditioned stimulus, CS) due to its pairing with another stimulus (unconditioned stimulus, US). We examined whether the extinction rate of the EC effect is moderated by feature-specific attention allocation. In two experiments, CSs were abstract Gabor patches varying along two orthogonal, perceptual dimensions (i.e. spatial frequency and orientation). During the acquisition phase, one of these dimensions was predictive of the valence of the USs. During the extinction phase, CSs were presented alone and participants were asked to categorise the CSs either according to their valence, the perceptual dimension that was task-relevant during the acquisition phase, or a perceptual dimension that was task-irrelevant during the acquisition phase. As predicted, explicit valence measures revealed a linear increase in the extinction rate of the EC effect as participants were encouraged to assign attention to non-evaluative stimulus information during the extinction phase. In Experiment 1, Affect Misattribution Paradigm (AMP) data mimicked this pattern of results, although the effect just missed conventional levels of significance. In Experiment 2, the AMP data revealed an increase of the EC effect if attention was focused on evaluative stimulus information. Potential mechanisms to explain these findings are discussed.

Evaluative conditioning procedures change people’s evaluations of stimuli that are paired with pleasant or unpleasant items. To test whether influence awareness allows people to resist such persuasive attempts, we conducted three experiments. In the first two experiments featuring low levels of influence awareness (N1 = 96, N2 = 93) we manipulated the degree of control people have in expressing their attitudes, by providing participants in one condition with the option to “pass” rather than respond, when they felt influenced in their evaluations of conditioned stimuli. In the third experiment (N3 = 240) we manipulated the level of influence awareness by using a warning instruction similar to the one found in prior controllability studies, while giving everyone the option to pass the evaluation when they felt influenced. All studies found that participants often failed to use the skip option to exert control over conditioned preferences. In some cases, this may be because participants failed to notice the pairings, but in most cases because participants lacked awareness that the pairings could influence them. Even when explicitly warned that the pairings could influence them, participants seemed to believe that they were not vulnerable to such effects.

It is easier to indicate the ink color of a color-neutral noun when it is presented in the color in which it had been shown frequently before, relative to print colors in which it had been shown less often. This phenomenon is known as color-word-contingency learning. It remains unclear whether participants actually learn semantic (word-color) associations or/and response (word-button) associations. We here present a novel variant of the paradigm that can disentangle semantic and response learning, because word-color and word-button associations are manipulated independently. In four experiments, each involving four daily sessions, novel words (pseudowords such as enas, fatu or imot) were probabilistically associated either with a particular color, a particular response-button position, or with both. Neutral trials were also included, and participants’ awareness of the contingencies was manipulated. The data showed no impact of explicit contingency awareness, but clear evidence both for response learning and for semantic learning, with effects emerging swiftly. Deeper processing of color information, with color words presented in black instead of color patches to indicate response-button positions, resulted in stronger effects, both for semantic and response learning. Our data add a crucial piece of evidence lacking so far in color-word contingency learning studies: Semantic learning effectively takes place even when associations are learned in an incidental way.

This article contains intensity and aversiveness ratings of electrical stimuli and data on electrodermal activity (skin conductance level and skin conductance response) during an implicit conditioning procedure. Further, answers from a questionnaire on contingency awareness are provided. The experiment consisted of three phases. In the acquisition, two types of visual stimuli (CS+ and CS-) were coupled to weakly and moderately painful electrical stimuli presented to the participants’ (N = 48) dominant hand. In the test phase, after both CS+ and CS- only the weakly painful electrical stimuli were presented. In the contingency test phase, no more electrical stimuli were presented and participants had the task to rate intensity and aversiveness as if an electrical stimulus had been presented. This phase served as a test for first-order contingency awareness. Afterwards participants filled in a questionnaire with five questions to assess their level of second-order contingency awareness. For more insight, please see Nocebo hyperalgesia induced by implicit conditioning (Bräscher and Witthöft, 2019). Keywords: Nocebo effect, Implicit conditioning, Electrodermal activity, Contingency awareness, Pain perception

The aim of this study was to test the effect of an evaluative conditioning (EC) task on implicit food evaluations and choices between healthy and unhealthy food, and whether the effect of the EC task on food choice would be mediated by implicit food evaluations. To induce the EC effect on implicit food evaluations and food choice, images of healthy and unhealthy foods were repeatedly paired with images of positively and negatively valenced faces, the pairing (healthy-positive/unhealthy-negative or healthy-negative/unhealthy-positive) manipulated between participants. Implicit food evaluations were measured using an Implicit Association Task (IAT), and food choice was measured using a food decision-making task consisting of 22 choices between healthy and unhealthy food items. Results showed a direct effect of EC condition on implicit food evaluations, but not on explicit food choice for the whole sample. However, an indirect effect of the EC task on food choice, mediated by implicit food evaluations, was found. Contingency awareness – whether participants were aware that foods were being paired with valenced stimuli – did not affect the strength of the EC effect, nor did attention to the EC task. Surprisingly, emotional eating was found to moderate the effect of the EC task on both implicit food evaluations and food choice, showing that the EC task had an effect only for those who scored low on emotional eating. In conclusion, this study makes a unique contribution to the EC literature by showing that food choice can be altered by conditioning implicit food evaluations, but that this may only work for people who do not score particularly high on emotional eating.

Can single pairing of background music with an advertised product condition choice behavior? Gorn's (1982) demonstration of this effect remains controversial given his unconventional conditioning procedure, unusual data analyses, probably confounded stimuli, and possible demand artifacts. We review prior criticism and conduct three conceptual replications (N = 182, 224, 127) circumventing these problems. Study 1 finds (weak) significant musical conditioning effects for low-involvement products. Study 2 fails to find effects for higher-involvement products. Study 3 showed conditioning of general brand and product evaluations but not of specific brand-related evaluations. Demand artifacts play a minor role; contingency awareness (marginally) amplifies conditioning effects across studies.

Background Transcranial direct current stimulation (tDCS) is a neuromodulation method that has been used to modulate learning. We tested whether anodal tDCS targeted at the left DLPFC could enhance learning in a semantic variant of discrimination eyeblink conditioning, i.e., whether the stimulation would have a specific effect on the discrimination ability, rate of acquisition, amplitude of the conditioned response (CR), or all of these. Methods Immediately prior to the eyeblink conditioning, the participants received either active stimulation of 1 mA for 10 min or sham stimulation. The anode was placed over F3 and the cathode over the right supraorbital area. The conditioned stimuli (CSs) were common Finnish male and female names that were presented as text. Male names were reinforced with an unconditioned stimulus. Results Stimulation had no effect on the learning rate or discrimination ratio, but the stimulated participants showed steeper CR acquisition in the initial phase of the experiment. Nevertheless, the participants in the stimulation group showed greater eyeblink CRs to the non-reinforced CS. Discussion Contrary to our initial hypothesis, the magnitude and rate of CRs to non-reinforced CS was higher in the active stimulation group than in the sham stimulation group, which may suggest deterioration of discrimination and contingency awareness in the used task. Our observations may suggest a lack of effect on the participants’ ability to discriminate between two different types of CS. Furthermore, cathodal modulation of the right prefrontal cortex may explain the change in magnitude and rate of CRs to non-reinforced CS.

Acquired fear responses often generalize from conditioned stimuli (CS) towards perceptually similar, but harmless generalization stimuli (GS). Knowledge on similarities between CS and GS may be explicit or implicit. Employing behavioral measures and whole-head magnetoencephalography, we here investigated the neurocognitive mechanisms underpinning implicit fear generalization. Twenty-nine participants underwent a classical conditioning procedure in which 32 different faces were either paired with an aversive scream (16 CS+) or remained unpaired (16 CS-). CS+ and CS- faces systematically differed from each other regarding their ratio of eye distance and mouth width. High versus low values on this “threat-related feature (TF)” implicitly predicted the presence or absence of the aversive scream. In pre- and post-conditioning phases, all CS and 32 novel GS faces were presented. 16 GS+ ​faces shared the TF of the 16 CS+ ​faces, while 16 ​GS- faces shared the TF of the 16 CS- faces. Behavioral tests confirmed that participants were fully unaware of TF-US contingencies. CS+ ​compared to CS- faces revealed higher unpleasantness, arousal and US-expectancy ratings. A generalization of these behavioral fear responses to GS+ ​compared to GS- faces was observed by trend only. Source-estimations of event-related fields showed stronger neural responses to both CS+ and GS+ ​compared to CS- and GS- in anterior temporal (

Although a substantial progress has been made in recent years on understanding the processes mediating extinction of learned threat, little is known about the context-dependent extinction of threat memories in elderly individuals. We used a 2-day differential threat conditioning and extinction procedure to determine whether young and older adults differed in the contextual recall of conditioned responses after extinction. On Day 1, conditioned stimuli were paired with an aversive electric shock in a ‘danger’ context and then extinguished in a different ‘safe’ context. On Day 2, the extinguished stimulus was presented to assess extinction recall (safe context), and threat renewal (danger context). Physiological and verbal report measures of threat conditioning were collected throughout the experiment. Skin conductance response (SCR data revealed no significant differences between age groups during acquisition and extinction of threat conditioning on Day 1. On Day 2, however, older adults showed impaired recall of extinction memory, with increased SCR to the extinguished stimulus in the ‘safe’ context, and reduced ability to process context properly. In addition, there were no age group differences in fear ratings and contingency awareness, thus revealing that aging selectively impairs extinction memories as indexed by autonomic responses. These results reveal that aging affects the capacity to use context to modulate learned responses to threat, possibly due to changes in brain structures that enable context-dependent behaviour and are preferentially vulnerable during aging.

Reproducibility and methodological robustness are of major concern in research today, also with respect to autonomic measures. Quantification of skin conductance responses (SCRs), for instance, relies on response characteristics such as response onset (i.e., latency), which were established more than four decades ago by using paper-pencil methods. Since then, data acquisition has advanced to digital methods, improving sampling rates up to 100,000 samples/second and thereby improving resolution and accuracy. Here, SCR latency as a major characteristic for defining an appropriate response window is revisited by using state-of-the-art equipment. Furthermore, SCR latencies are investigated across different stimulus modalities (tactile, auditory, visual) and with respect to their temporal dynamics over the course of a learning experiment (i.e., fear conditioning). The established response latency criteria were largely confirmed even though results did suggest an even narrower and potential stimulus modality-specific latency criterion. Exploratory analyses investigating individual differences in SCR latencies provided first evidence for a role of sex and cognitive effects (i.e., contingency awareness) while dispositional negativity as well as other personality traits did not affect SCR latencies. Consequently, SCR latencies might have an informative and discriminative value beyond a solely criterial function for defining response windows. The current findings may help to improve the rigor of using SCRs and suggest that SCR latency as a descriptive measure warrants further investigation.

In evaluative conditioning (EC), the pairing of a positively or negatively valenced stimulus (US) with a neutral stimulus (CS) leads to a corresponding change in liking of the CS. EC research so far has concentrated on using unambiguously positive or negative USs. However, attitude objects are often ambivalent, i.e., can simultaneously possess positive and negative features. The present research investigated whether ambivalence can be evaluatively conditioned and whether contingency awareness moderates this effect. In two studies, positive, negative, neutral, and ambivalent USs were paired with affectively neutral CSs. Results showed standard EC effects that were moderated by contingency awareness. Most interestingly, EC effects were also obtained for the ambivalent USs, indicating that ambivalence can indeed be conditioned. However, contingency awareness seemed to play a lesser role in ambivalence conditioning. Ambivalence EC effects were obtained on subjective and objective direct measures of ambivalence as well as on a more indirect measure.

Humans responded on multiple random-ratio (RR) random-interval (RI) schedules, and their verbalized performance awareness (PA; i.e., their ability to accurately describe what they did) was measured in three experiments. In Experiment 1, instructions informed participants that to earn points, either sometimes rapid responding and sometimes slow responding would work best (accurate instructions); rapid responding would work best (go fast instructions); spaced responding would work best (go slow instructions); or no advice was provided (minimal instructions). In Experiments 2 and 3, participants received either accurate or minimal instructions and were subject to extinction after a multiple RR-RI schedule. In all experiments, both performance awareness, and receiving accurate instructions, were related to schedule-sensitive responding, but were unrelated to one another - participants receiving accurate-rate instructions were not more likely to show performance awareness than those exposed to minimal instructions. Both higher performance awareness and exposure to accurate instructions predicted faster extinction in Experiment 2 but not in Experiment 3. The current results suggest that performance awareness rather than contingency awareness is more strongly related to humans displaying schedule-typical behavior and that this is not strongly related to any explicit verbal instructions that are given.

Attitudes are a core construct of social psychology, and research showed that attitudes can be acquired by merely pairing neutral stimuli with other liked or disliked stimuli (i.e., evaluative conditioning, EC). In this research we address the role of different memory processes contributing to EC. Although it is commonly found that memory for the pairings increases EC, we argue that memory performance data obtained in the standard paradigm remain ambiguous. We hypothesize that memory for stimulus pairings may moderate EC by means of an intentional use of conscious recollection as well as through unintended effects of memory. In two experiments we used modified memory tests that distinguish between these different memory processes on an item-level by identifying recollection as the participant's ability to control memory performance. The analyses of the experiments showed that both intended and unintended influences independently moderate EC. Based on these results we discuss the role of different memory processes in EC, and how memory and learning processes may be related.

We examined whether the generalization of recently acquired likes and dislikes depends on feature-specific attention allocation. Likes and dislikes were established by means of an evaluative-conditioning procedure in which participants were presented with several exemplars of two subordinate categories (e.g., young men vs. old women). Whereas exemplars of one category were consistently paired with negative stimuli, exemplars of the second category were consistently paired with positive stimuli. In addition, we manipulated feature-specific attention allocation for specific stimulus dimensions (e.g., gender vs. age), either during (Experiments 1 and 2) or before the acquisition phase of the experiment (Experiment 3). Both direct and indirect attitude measures revealed a clear impact of this manipulation on attitude generalization. More specifically, only generalization stimuli that were similar to the CSs in terms of the stimulus dimension that was selectively attended to were evaluated in a manner that was congruent with the acquired liking of those CSs.

In the field of evaluative conditioning (EC), two opposing theories—propositional single-process theory versus dual-process theory—are currently being discussed in the literature. The present set of experiments test a crucial prediction to adjudicate between these two theories: Dual-process theory postulates that evaluative conditioning can occur without awareness of the contingency between conditioned stimulus (CS) and unconditioned stimulus (US); in contrast, single-process propositional theory postulates that EC requires CS-US contingency awareness. In a set of three studies, we experimentally manipulate contingency awareness by presenting the CSs very briefly, thereby rendering it unlikely to be processed consciously. We address potential issues with previous studies on EC with subliminal or near-threshold CSs that limited their interpretation. Across two experiments, we consistently found an EC effect for CSs presented for 1000 ms and consistently failed to find an EC effect for briefly presented CSs. In a third pre-registered experiment, we again found evidence for an EC effect with CSs presented for 1000 ms, and we found some indication for an EC effect for CSs presented for 20 ms.

The present research investigated whether evaluatively conditioned attitudes toward members of a social category (CSs) generalize to other stimuli belonging to the same category as the CSs (generalization at the stimulus level) and to the category itself (generalization at the category level). In four experiments, USs were paired with schematic or naturalistic CSs belonging to certain fictitious groups. Afterward, attitudes toward the CSs, toward non-presented exemplars of the CS category, and toward the CS category were assessed. Results revealed evidence for generalization effects in EC on both the stimulus and the category level. Transfer effects were greater when participants’ awareness of the CS–US contingency (CA) was high. Moreover, we found differences in generalization between the stimulus and category level, indicating that different processes might contribute to the effects. Theoretical and practical implications such as using EC as a tool for changing attitudes toward social groups will be discussed.

When presenting a neutral stimulus (CS) in close temporal and spatial proximity to a positive or negative stimulus (US) the former is often observed to adopt the valence of the latter, a phenomenon named evaluative conditioning (EC). It is already well established that under most conditions, contingency awareness is important for an EC effect to occur. In addition to that, some findings suggest that awareness of the stimulus pairs is not only relevant during the learning phase, but that it is also relevant whether memory for the pairings is still available during the measurement phase. As previous research has shown that memory is better after temporally distributed than after contiguous (massed) repetitions, it seems plausible that also EC effects are moderated by distributed practice manipulations. This was tested in the current studies. In two experiments with successful distributed practice manipulations on memory, we show that also the magnitude of the EC effect was larger for pairs learned under spaced compared to massed conditions. Both effects, on memory and on EC, are found after a within-participant and after a between-participant manipulation. However, we did not find significant differences in the EC effect for different conditions of spaced practice. These findings are in line with the assumption that EC is based on similar processes as memory for the pairings.

In three experiments, we tested the influence of instructions about an allegedly upcoming extinction or counterconditioning phase on evaluative conditioning (EC) effects. After an acquisition phase in which neutral stimuli were related to positive or negative stimuli via instructions (Experiments 1 and 2a) or actual pairings (Experiment 2b), three different groups of participants were either informed that in the next phase the neutral stimuli would be presented without positive or negative stimuli (extinction instruction), that the neutral stimuli in the next phase would be paired with stimuli of the opposite valence than before (counterconditioning instruction), or received no further instructions. Afterwards, liking of the originally neutral stimuli was measured either with an evaluative rating (Experiment 1) or with an Implicit Association Test (IAT; Experiments 2a and 2b). EC was reduced in the counterconditioning condition of Experiment 1 and in the joint analysis of Experiments 2a and 2b. The extinction instruction led to a reduction of EC only in Experiment 1. Finally, whether the acquisition phase consisted of instructions about CS–US pairings (Experiment 2a) or the actual experience of CS–US pairings (Experiment 2b) did not significantly impact the observed changes in liking. Overall, our results suggest that similar mechanisms might mediate instruction- and experienced-based EC. Our results are in line with propositional models of EC but can be explained also by association formation models and dual process models of EC, provided that certain auxiliary assumptions are made.

Fear extinction can be viewed as an inhibitory learning process. This is supported by post-extinction phenomena demonstrating the return of fear, such as reinstatement. Recent work has questioned this account, claiming that extinction initiated immediately after fear acquisition can abolish the return of fear. In the current study, participants were fear conditioned to four different conditioned stimuli (CS) and underwent extinction either immediately or after a 24 h delay. During extinction, we manipulated CS contingency awareness by presenting two of the CSs (one CS+, one CS-) under non-masked conditions and the other two CSs under masked conditions. Compared to delayed extinction, immediate extinction of non-masked CSs promoted less extinction of fear-potentiated startle and shock expectancy ratings and less reinstatement of fear-potentiated startle without affecting shock expectancy ratings. Critically, future research should clarify how the differences between immediate and delayed extinction in within-session extinction modulate the recovery of fear.

Background Physiological responses have been used in individuals with acquired disability to enable communicative interaction without motor movement. This study explored four autonomic nervous system (ANS) signals — electrodermal activity, skin temperature, cardiac patterns and respiratory patterns — to enable interaction with individuals born with profound intellectual and multiple disabilities (PIMD). Method A series of case studies were conducted to teach a 15-year-old individual with PIMD to voluntarily control his ANS signals for the purposes of communicative interaction. Training was carried out according to an alternating treatment single-subject research design. Results Training was unsuccessful; however, ANS signal patterns revealed issues unique to people with PIMD: profound intrasubject variability, discrepancy between physiological responses and caregiver perspectives, and the participant ’ s lack of contingency awareness. Conclusions These three priority areas unique to people with congenital PIMD must be addressed before ANS signals can be used to enable communicative interaction with this population.

Evaluative conditioning (EC) is the valence change of a stimulus (conditioned stimulus, CS) that is due to the previous pairing with another stimulus (unconditioned stimulus, US). We investigated whether EC can occur also when the CS–US pairings are not experienced directly by the participant but are implied by other events that the participant encounters. In two experiments, positive USs were presented in some trials and negative USs in other trials. Afterwards, participants were given information from which it was possible to conclude that CSs were covertly present during these trials. Finally, the valence of these CSs was registered using both implicit (Implicit Association Test, affective priming) and explicit measures (valence ratings). In line with the assumption that EC effects can be based on CS–US pairings that are not directly experienced, the valence of the CSs changed in the direction of the US with which they were covertly paired. This effect was observed both on explicit and on implicit measures. We argue that several aspects of our results are in line with propositional models of EC and fit less well with association formation models.

Evaluative conditioning (EC) is the valence change of a (typically neutral) stimulus (CS) that is due to the previous pairing with another (typically valent) stimulus (US). It has been repeatedly shown that EC effects are stronger or existent only if participants know which US was paired with which CS. Knowledge of the CS–US pairings is usually measured temporally close to both the conditioning phase and the CS valence measurement phase. Hence, the relation between EC and knowledge about the pairings could indicate either that participants need to become aware of the pairings at some point or that they need to remember them during the CS valence test. We isolated the impact of memory during the CS valence test in a study that encompassed two sessions. During the first session, participants were presented with CS–US pairings. The valence of the CSs was measured in a second session several days later using both a rating scale and an affective priming procedure. Memory for the pairings was measured both during the first and the second session. Using item-based multilevel analysis, we found that EC in the second session was related to memory for the pairings during the second session, but not to the memory for the pairings measured immediately after the learning phase. For the pairs that were remembered during the first session, but not during the second session, no EC effect was found. These results suggest that memory for CS–US pairings during valence measurement can be relevant for EC effects to occur.

Evaluative conditioning (EC) is generally considered to be one of the routes via which likes and dislikes are acquired. We identify recent trends in EC research and speculate about the topics that will dominate future research on EC. Many of the recent developments in EC research were shaped by functional definitions of EC that refer only to environmental conditions, but not to mental processes and representations. These functional definitions stimulated the development of and debates between theories about the mental processes that mediate EC. These trends, as well as greater methodological and conceptual sophistication, inspired meta-conditional studies that aim at determining the conditions under which EC is characterized by certain properties. The question of whether EC depends on contingency awareness remains a central topic, albeit with a stronger link to theorizing about underlying mental processes. Other automaticity features have gained enhanced interest, as can for example be seen in research investigating whether EC is goal-independent and whether EC is resource-independent. We argue that future research would benefit from a sharper distinction between processes that operate during acquisition (i.e., when CS–US pairs are presented) and processes that operate during measurement (i.e., when the effects of CS–US pairings are assessed). We conclude with a short summary of all articles in this Special Issue, relating them to the identified trends in EC research.

Evaluative conditioning (EC) refers to changes in the evaluation of a conditioned stimulus (CS) due to its repeated pairing with an unconditioned stimulus (US). One of the most debated topics in EC research is whether or not EC is dependent on contingency awareness. In this study, we go beyond this debate by examining whether contingency awareness mediates the impact of attentional resources and goal-directed attention on EC. Attentional resources were manipulated by presenting CSs and USs either within the same modality or in different modalities. Goal-directed attention was manipulated by asking participants to respond to the CSs or to the USs. Results indicate that the effect of goal-directed attention on EC is mediated by contingency awareness, whereas the effect of attentional resources on EC is not.

Schedules of reinforcement typically produce reliable patterns of behaviour, and one factor that can cause deviations from these normally reliable patterns is schizotypy. Low scorers on the unusual experiences subscale of the Oxford-Liverpool Inventory of Feelings and Experiences performed as expected on a yoked random-ratio (RR), random-interval (RI) schedule of reinforcement, with significantly higher rates of responding on the RR schedule than in the RI schedule. However, high scorers in UE showed no such differences between response rates between the RR and RI schedules. In addition, contingency awareness scores were high, and did not differ in low UE scorers for both types of schedule, whilst awareness scores differed significantly between the schedules in high UE scorers, with more awareness of the RR schedule than the RI one. These results suggest that, as well as being unable to differentiate between the RR and RI schedules in terms of response rates, high UE scorers are also unable to verbally describe the RI schedule parameters.

In two experiments, we tested the generality of the learning effects in the recently-introduced color-word contingency learning paradigm. Participants made speeded evaluative judgments to valenced target words. Each of a set of distracting nonwords was presented most often with either positive or negative target words. We observed that participants responded faster on trials that respected these contingencies than on trials that contradicted the contingencies. The contingencies also produced changes in liking: in a subsequent explicit evaluative rating task, participants rated positively-conditioned nonwords more positively than negatively-conditioned nonwords. Interestingly, contingency effects in the performance task correlated with this explicit rating effect in both experiments. In Experiment 2, all effects reported were independent of subjective and objective contingency awareness (which was completely lacking), even when awareness was measured at the item level. Our results reveal that learning in this type of performance task extends to nonword-valence contingencies and to responses different from those emitted during the performance task. We discuss the implications of these findings for theories about the processes that underlie contingency learning in performance tasks and for research on evaluative conditioning.

Whereas previous evaluative conditioning (EC) studies produced inconsistent results concerning the role of contingency knowledge, there are classical eye-blink conditioning studies suggesting that declarative processes are involved in trace conditioning but not in delay conditioning. In two EC experiments pairing neutral sounds (conditioned stimuli; CSs) with affective pictures (unconditioned stimuli; USs), we tested whether the type of conditioning procedure affects the relationship between awareness and EC. Auditory CSs and visual USs were either overlapping and co-terminating (Delay Conditioning Group), or they were separated by a short temporal gap (Trace Conditioning Group). In both groups, contingency awareness was manipulated by varying the duration at which the US was presented during conditioning. Furthermore, in addition to a post-conditioning measure of awareness, US detectability was measured concurrently during the learning phase in Experiment 2. US exposure duration affected both measures of awareness. The data of both experiments demonstrate that EC does not occur if the USs are presented at very brief durations, but reliable EC effects can be observed at longer US exposure durations. As there were no differences between trace and delay conditioning, the data suggest that contingency awareness plays a crucial role in trace and in delay conditioning of evaluative responses. These results challenge automatic association-formation accounts of EC, but they are in line with ‘single-process’ accounts assuming EC to be dependent on conscious declarative knowledge about CS–US contingencies.

Evaluative conditioning (EC) refers to the effect that pairings of a conditioned stimulus (CS) with a valenced unconditioned stimulus (US) lead to changes in the evaluation of the CS. There have been recurring debates about whether EC requires awareness of the contingency between CSs and USs during learning. We argue that the memory performance data obtained in the standard paradigm remain ambiguous about the role of contingency awareness during the encoding of CS–US pairings. First, memory performance data are unable to distinguish between encoding-related versus retrieval-related effects. Second, the relation between memory performance and evaluation is correlational, which limits conclusions about causal relations between memory performance and EC effects. These ambiguities imply that any possible data pattern can be interpreted in at least two different ways. It is concluded that a resolution of the current debate requires alternative approaches in which contingency awareness is experimentally manipulated during the encoding of CS–US pairings.

There is considerable debate about whether differential delay eyeblink conditioning can be acquired without awareness of the stimulus contingencies. Previous investigations of the relationship between differential-delay eyeblink conditioning and awareness of the stimulus contingencies have assessed awareness after the conditioning session was finished using a post-experimental questionnaire. In two experiments, the point at which contingency awareness developed during the conditioning session was estimated from a button-press measure of expectancy of the unconditioned stimulus (US). In both experiments, knowledge of the stimulus contingencies and acquisition of differential delay eyeblink conditioning developed approximately in parallel. In Experiment 1 it was shown that predicting the US facilitated eyeblink conditioning compared with predicting the eyeblink response. In Experiment 2, a masking task was used that slowed down the emergence of awareness, and it was shown that differential conditioning only occurred in participants who were able to predict the US. The current findings challenge the hypothesis that differential delay eyeblink conditioning is entirely mediated by a functionally and neurally distinct nondeclarative learning system.

Whether human evaluative conditioning can occur without contingency awareness has been the subject of an intense and ongoing debate for decades, troubled by a wide array of methodological difficulties. Following recent methodological innovations, the available evidence currently points to the conclusion that evaluative conditioning effects do not occur without contingency awareness. In a simulation, we demonstrate, however, that these innovations are strongly biased toward the conclusion that evaluative conditioning requires contingency awareness, confounding the measurement of contingency memory with conditioned attitudes. We adopt a process-dissociation procedure to separate the memory and attitude components. In 4 studies, the attitude parameter is validated using existing attitudes and applied to probe for contingency-unaware evaluative conditioning. A fifth experiment incorporates a time-delay manipulation confirming the dissociability of the attitude and memory components. The results indicate that evaluative conditioning can produce attitudes without conscious awareness of the contingencies. Implications for theories of evaluative conditioning and associative learning are discussed.

As a fundamental learning process, fear conditioning promotes the formation of associations between predictive cues and biologically significant signals. In its application to pain, conditioning may provide important insight into mechanisms underlying pain-related fear, although knowledge especially in interoceptive pain paradigms remains scarce. Furthermore, while the influence of contingency awareness on excitatory learning is subject of ongoing debate, its role in pain-related acquisition is poorly understood and essentially unknown regarding extinction as inhibitory learning. Therefore, we addressed the impact of contingency awareness on learned emotional responses to pain- and safety-predictive cues in a combined dataset of two pain-related conditioning studies. In total, 75 healthy participants underwent differential fear acquisition, during which rectal distensions as interoceptive unconditioned stimuli (US) were repeatedly paired with a predictive visual cue (conditioned stimulus; CS(+)) while another cue (CS(-)) was presented unpaired. During extinction, both CS were presented without US. CS valence, indicating learned emotional responses, and CS-US contingencies were assessed on visual analog scales (VAS). Based on an integrative measure of contingency accuracy, a median-split was performed to compare groups with low vs. high contingency accuracy regarding learned emotional responses. To investigate predictive value of contingency accuracy, regression analyses were conducted. Highly accurate individuals revealed more pronounced negative emotional responses to CS(+) and increased positive responses to CS(-) when compared to participants with low contingency accuracy. Following extinction, highly accurate individuals had fully extinguished pain-predictive cue properties, while exhibiting persistent positive emotional responses to safety signals. In contrast, individuals with low accuracy revealed equally positive emotional responses to both, CS(+) and CS(-). Contingency accuracy predicted variance in the formation of positive responses to safety cues while no predictive value was found for danger cues following acquisition and for neither cue following extinction. Our findings underscore specific roles of learned danger and safety in pain-related acquisition and extinction. Contingency accuracy appears to distinctly impact learned emotional responses to safety and danger cues, supporting aversive learning to occur independently from CS-US awareness. The interplay of cognitive and emotional factors in shaping excitatory and inhibitory pain-related learning may contribute to altered pain processing, underscoring its clinical relevance in chronic pain.

Previous research suggests that the repeated performance of approach and avoidance (AA) actions in response to a stimulus causes changes in stimulus evaluations. Kawakami, Phills, Steele, and Dovidio (2007) and Jones, Vilensky, Vasey, and Fazio (2013) provided evidence that these AA training effects occur even when stimuli are presented only subliminally. We also examined whether reliable AA training effects can be observed with subliminal stimulus presentations but added more sensitive checks of perceptual stimulus discriminability. Three experiments, including a direct replication of the study by Kawakami et al. (2007), failed to provide any evidence for effects of subliminal AA training on implicit or explicit evaluations. Bayesian analyses indicated that our data provide robust evidence that subliminal AA training does not cause changes in evaluations. In contrast, we observed changes in evaluations when participants were provided with (either correct or incorrect) information about the stimulus-action contingencies in the subliminal AA training task and when participants performed a supraliminal AA training task that allowed participants to detect these contingencies. These findings support the idea that contingency awareness is necessary for the occurrence of AA training effects.

Emotionally significant objects and events in our environment attract attention based on their motivational relevance for survival. Such kind of emotional attention is thought to lead to affect-specific amplified processing that closely resembles effects of directed attention. Although there has been extensive research on prioritized processing of visual emotional stimuli, the spatio-temporal dynamics of motivated attention mechanisms in auditory processing are less clearly understood. We investigated modulatory effects of emotional attention at early auditory processing stages using time-sensitive whole-head magnetoencephalography. A novel associative learning procedure involving multiple conditioned stimuli (CSs) per affective category was introduced to specifically test whether affect-specific modulation can proceed in a rapid and highly differentiating fashion in humans. Auditory evoked fields (AEFs) were recorded in response to 42 different ultrashort, click-like sounds before and after affective conditioning with pleasant, unpleasant, or neutral auditory scenes. As hypothesized, emotional attention affected neural click tone processing at time intervals of the P20-50m (20–50 ms) and the N1m (100–130 ms), two early AEF components sensitive to directed selective attention (Woldorff et al., 1993). Distributed source localization revealed amplified processing of tones associated with aversive or pleasant compared with neutral auditory scenes at auditory sensory, frontal and parietal cortex regions. Behavioral tests did not indicate any awareness for the contingent CS–UCS (unconditioned stimulus) relationships in the participants, suggesting affective associative learning in absence of contingency awareness. Our findings imply early and highly differentiating affect-specific modulation of auditory stimulus processing supported by neural mechanisms and circuitry comparable with those reported for directed auditory attention.

Previous research suggests that priming of behavioral concepts (e.g., drinking water) motivates consumers outside conscious awareness, but only if primes match a current need (e.g., fluid deprivation). The present article reports two studies testing whether subliminal conditioning (subliminally priming a behavioral concept and linking it to positive affect) can motivate such need-related behaviors even in the absence of deprivation. Both studies showed an interaction effect: Motivation to drink water increased with fluid deprivation, and subliminally conditioning drinking water more positive only motivated drinking in the absence of deprivation. Furthermore, Study 2 suggests that motivation resulting from conditioning is more specific than following deprivation, as only the latter can be reduced by pursuing alternative behaviors (i.e., eating high-liquid foods). Thus, although traditionally the motivation for need-related behaviors is thought to depend on deprivation, this research shows subliminal conditioning can motivate consumers as if they were deprived.

One way to learn to like or dislike a neutral target stimulus is through associations with positive or negative context stimuli. The present research investigates whether people need to be aware of the association between a target and a context stimulus (i.e., contingency aware) in order for associative learning of likes and dislikes to occur. We predicted that awareness of the association between context and target is necessary when target novelty is low, but not when target novelty is high. We conducted two experiments in which we varied target novelty and measured contingency awareness using a picture-bound recognition task. This allowed us to separately investigate evaluative conditioning for “contingency awareness” and “contingency unawareness” context–target pairs. The results show, as predicted, that awareness of the association between context and target is needed for low-novelty targets but not needed for high-novelty targets.

I present an overview of emotion theories, organised around the question of emotion causation. I argue that theories of emotion causation should ideally address the problems of elicitation, intensity, and differentiation. Each of these problems can be divided into a subquestion that asks about the relation between stimuli and emotions (i.e., the functional level of process description, cf. Marr, 1982) and a subquestion that asks about the mechanism and representations that intervene (i.e., the algorithmic level of process description). The overview reveals that theories of emotion causation sometimes differ with regard to the kind of process that they hold responsible for emotion causation. More precisely, they hold different assumptions regarding the conditions under which the process is supposed to operate (optimal versus suboptimal), the format of the representations involved (propositional versus perceptual), and the object or input of the central process (stimulus versus responses/experience). Further, the overview reveals that theories of emotion causation sometimes differ with regard to the level of process description that they focus on. Finally, the overview brings to light several similarities among the theories discussed.

This study was designed to examine whether self-esteem can be used as a source of evaluative conditioning, and whether implicit or explicit self-esteem was more predictive of the evaluative conditioning effect. Moreover, the role of contingency awareness in the acquisition of the evaluative conditioning effect was also examined. Words related to the self and a general other were served as unconditioned stimuli (USs) in the evaluative conditioning process in order to see whether the evaluation could be transferred to neutral, abstract paintings after 10 times of pairing. An evaluative conditioning effect was demonstrated in that the evaluation of the paintings became more positive after repeatedly paired with words about the self but not words about general others. Implicit self-esteem predicted the magnitude of the evaluative conditioning effect, while the association between explicit self-esteem and the evaluative conditioning effect was nonsignificant, both with and without the effect of contingency awareness being controlled for. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.