Eye movement desensitization across subjects: Subjective and physiological measures of treatment efficacy

The efficacy and psychophysiological correlates of dual-attention tasks in eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR)

“…Boudewyns, Stwertka, & Hyer, 1993;Montgomery & Ayllon, 1994), findings of several studies contradict ours by demonstrating that EMDR-with or -without eye movements leads to significant positive, but equivalent treatment effects (Pitman et al,1996;Renfrey & Spates, 1994;Sanderson & Carpenter, 1992). To date, research that has compared EMDR-with EMs to EMDR-without EMs has been difficult to interpret due to methodological issues.…”

A meta-analysis of the contribution of eye movements in processing emotional memories

“…A further 297 were excluded because they were either a case report of EMDR treatment or a study looking at a treatment outcome study comparing EMDR to a waitlist or an alternative treatment procedure. A further group of 61 studies were excluded either because the eye movements was not compared to no eye movement under identical condition, for example (Elofsson et al 2008), or the comparison lacked sufficient randomisation, or the study was a prepost design that did not control for order effects for example (Montgomery & Ayllon, 1994).…”

What does the data say about the importance of eye movement in EMDR?

“…Other studies we excluded did not have a randomisation process or order effects were not controlled for (Montgomery & Ayllon, 1994). In that study eye movements were reported to have a positive effect but given this failure in randomisation we excluded it, even though it was included in a previous meta-analysis (Davidson & Parker, 2001).…”