A meta-analysis of the contribution of eye movements in processing emotional memories
Highlights
► Previous meta-analysis that concluded eye movements are irrelevant had methodological issues. ► Eye movements effect processing emotional memories when compared to no eye movements. ► The effect size for eye movements in a therapy context was moderate and significant. ► The effect size for eye movements in a laboratory setting was large and significant. ► EMDR treatment fidelity was associated with a larger effect size for eye movements.
Section snippets
Search procedure
Searches were conducted in Medline, PsycINFO, and Science Direct databases. The search was done in two parts: the first used the keywords non eye movement or no eye movement or eyes fixed or eyes stationary or without the eye movement or eye stationary paired with eye movements, or eyes moving or eye movement; the second also used a keyword search of eye movements paired with eye movement desensitization. The search was restricted to articles only involving humans and between 1989 (when EMDR
Inclusion of studies
A flowchart describing the selection of studies is reported in Fig. 1. The three searches and four articles resulted in 891 unique studies. Of these 103 were excluded because they studied the effect of eye movement during sleep and 314 were excluded because they contained no original data and were review papers only. 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
Discussion
The present meta-analysis provided an up-to-date evaluation of the efficacy of eye movements in processing emotional memories. The 14 studies that investigated the additional value of eye movements in EMDR treatment averaged a significant medium effect size advantage for eye movements over no eye movement. Heterogeneity was found to be moderate in these analyses, and this was reduced to zero after removal of two possible outliers. In 10 laboratory studies that looked at the effects of eye
Acknowledgements
We received no financial support for the work reported in this paper.
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