The Effect of Emotional Freedom Techniques on Stress Biochemistry: A Randomized Controlled Trial

Biology / mechanism👥 83 participants⚖️ vs. supportive interview (active) and no-treatment, single-session 3-arm designModerate rigor✓ Source-checked📍 United States

In plain English. 83 ordinary adults, not selected for any diagnosis, tried one hour-long session of tapping, a supportive talking session, or nothing at all, and researchers measured the stress hormone cortisol in their saliva before and after. The tapping group's cortisol, anxiety, and depression scores all dropped more than in the other two groups. This was a single short session in a general, non-clinical sample, so it speaks to an immediate biological response rather than a lasting clinical treatment effect.

What they found

people took part

After a single one-hour session, the EFT group showed a 24.39% drop in cortisol versus 14.25% (supportive interview) and 14.44% (no-treatment) (group difference p<.03), alongside a 58.34% drop in anxiety (p<.05) and 49.33% drop in depression (p<.002).

How the study worked

Who took partnon-clinical adult community volunteers (n=83)

What they didThis study measured biological or physiological signals before and after tapping to probe how it may work.

Compared withsupportive interview (active) and no-treatment, single-session 3-arm design

Measured withSA-45 (psychological distress, anxiety, depression subscales), salivary cortisol

⭐ Why this study matters

Salivary cortisol is drawn and assayed in a lab — nobody can talk their glands into producing less of it to please a researcher. This three-arm trial found tapping outperformed both a supportive conversation and doing nothing at all on that exact hard measure, in addition to anxiety and depression scores, which is about as clean a piece of biological evidence as this field has produced.

💡 Where this could help

If this finding holds up at scale, it points to something simple and widely usable: a single hour of a free, self-administered technique that ordinary, non-clinical adults could learn and use themselves to blunt their body's stress-hormone response, with no therapist's office and no ongoing course of treatment required.

🔬 What to study next

A natural next step is tracking what happens biologically in the hours and days after that single session, not just immediately after: does the cortisol drop hold at 24 or 48 hours, and does it show up alongside changes in HRV or inflammatory markers like CRP? It would also be worth testing dose-response, whether a second or third one-hour session produces a bigger or more durable cortisol shift than the first, mapping whether the effect builds with practice or is a one-time reset.

The full record

Design	Biology / mechanism
Participants	83 people
Population	non-clinical adult community volunteers
Comparison group	supportive interview (active) and no-treatment, single-session 3-arm design
Outcome measures	SA-45 (psychological distress, anxiety, depression subscales), salivary cortisol
Journal	Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease
Year	2012
Country	United States
Language	English
Method	EFT / tapping
Publication type	Study / trial
Verification	✓ Confirmed against the primary source

Read the original study →

Cite this study

APA

Church, D., Yount, G., & Brooks, A.J. (2012). The Effect of Emotional Freedom Techniques on Stress Biochemistry: A Randomized Controlled Trial. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. https://doi.org/10.1097/NMD.0b013e31826b9fc1

This record is part of the Tapping Evidence Base — an openly-sourced, fully-referenced directory of the research on EFT/tapping. Explore more studies on Stress & Cortisol · Anxiety · Depression · How It Works (Biology)