Spanos, Arango & DeGroot (1993) reasoned that the degree of salience of the hypnotic context may be the critical factor in how context influences the TAS and hypnotic susceptibility relationship. Approximately equal numbers of high, medium and low hypnotically susceptible subjects were assigned to either an explicitly hypnotic, (Context) or nonhypnotic (No context) condition. For the Context condition, the participants were explicitly informed that the questionnaire study was a follow up of the prior hypnosis testing. The subjects were also told that the performance on the questionnaires was related to hypnotizability. In the No Context condition, the subjects were merely requested to participate in a psychology experiment. No reference was made to their prior hypnosis participation.

Spanos et al. (1993) found no significant differences between the Context and No Context conditions. The TAS by Context interaction for the CURSS: Objective scale was not significant, while the interaction effects for the CURSS: Subjective were marginal at best (.05 < p < .10). Moreover, there were no significant differences between the size of the correlations for the explicitly hypnotic, and the noncontext conditions for the CURSS: Objective (z = 1.35, p > .05). For the subjective subscale of the CURSS, the correlation between the TAS and hypnotizability was significantly higher for the In-Context than the No Context condition (z = 2.007, p < .045).