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CHAPTER 3 84 for this study. However, participants may not have made a strict distinction between these measurements, but a more crude and general evaluation based on negative valence and arousal. Possibly, touching the contaminant became less unpleasant over the various trials, and participants may have subsequently rated all related items, i.e., CFDD and threat beliefs, as less negative. The moderate to high correlations between declines in CFDD ratings and declines in threat belief ratings (see Table 2) suggest that this may be the case. Additionally, several participants reported that they had difficulty explaining why the degree to which they believed their threat belief had decreased. The explanations (see Table 3) could be a case of “telling more than we can know” (Nisbett & Wilson, 1977): participants may have attempted to report on cognitive processes that are largely or entirely inaccessible by introspection. Perceived control did not change from the pre- to the post-test for any of the conditions, or differ between conditions. Van den Hout et al. (2011) found an increase in perceived control over contamination, danger, and disgust after E+SB and E+RP, which was larger for the E+SB than for the E+RP condition for disgust in the first session. However, van den Hout et al. (2012) did not find any pre- to post-test changes or interactions with condition in perceived control. It thus remains unclear whether using SB during exposure affects perceived control, but it is unlikely that perceived control explains the findings in this study. The generalizability of the current findings should be put to test in a clinical sample. However, results obtained with analogue samples are useful for understanding OC-related phenomena (Abramowitz et al., 2014). OC symptoms are prevalent in nonclinical populations, and the maintenance factors are similar to those in clinical populations. There are quantitative differences in the severity of OC symptoms between clinical and nonclinical populations, but qualitatively, symptoms appear to be largely similar (Abramowitz et al., 2014). Furthermore, Rachman et al. (2011) initiated the investigation of E+SB in healthy participants after successfully treating patients with a fear of contamination and compulsive washing with this