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Do you know what restrictions and effects are affecting your characters?
Say you are affected by an effect like Faith-Staeling Strike that prevents the casting of divine spells, do you know you can't do that? Or do you only become aware that something is wrong if you attempt to cast one, possibly wasting a standard action.
Same goes for penalties or other conditions that have no apparent visual effects. If you're affected by Pessimism do you know you have -2 to attack rolls or is it the DMs job to substract 2 from their rolls in secret or do you simply know you are feeling bad without knowing what that entails?
I'm not asking if the PCs know what spells, what monster, what abilities or whatever else is causing the penalties or restriction, there are Knowledges and Spellcraft for that, but rather if the players are aware of the effects it has on their characters.
The players should generally be aware of the conditions their characters are suffering from. For a character, it is more abstract. They don't know they have 10 out of 65 hit points left, they just know they are pretty darn wounded. For something like Pessimism, the character knows that he is doomed and isn't fighting as well. The player knows that he is taking -2 to his rolls.
As far as prohibited actions like, like Faith Stealing Strike, you can't take the action, so you can't 'waste' the action.
Unless an ability says or at least strongly implies that it shouldn't be known, players should definitely know how, if not why, a character is being effected.
As Dave Justus said. It's for the sake of game fairness. Positive effects are always known to the players.
Negative effects are another matter. Some GMs are benevolent enough to let the players know remaining HP, or even that some actions are bound to auto-fail (some maneuvers and spells iirc), which is helpful for amateur players.
Others can be more strict and track privately HP, damaged attributes, curses...
Most of the time is GM job to turn 'numbers' into narrative fantasy.
Merry weekend to everyone!
In regards to wounds my group usually does a threshold system of Grazed/wounded/critical/deathsdoor each one referring to a certain percentage of HP remaining. The way I look at it is, if you've been fighting with this guy for a while, you probably know when he's fine, and when he's flashing in and out of consciousness.
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OP, thank you for getting effect/affect right in your original question.