PTSD trial in institutionalized abused male juveniles (as tabulated in Sebastian & Nelms 2017)

Randomized trial👥 16 participants⚖️ vs. waitlistPreliminary✓ Source-checked📍 United States

In plain English. Sixteen institutionalized teenage boys who had experienced abuse tried a single tapping session or were put on a waitlist. The tapping group showed a very large drop in trauma symptoms. The original study itself didn't calculate a standard effect-size number — that number was computed afterward by a separate research team pooling many studies together. When we redid that calculation ourselves from the study's own published numbers, we got very similar (though not identical) results, which suggests the figure here is a legitimate, if indirectly-derived, effect size rather than an error — but it's worth knowing it's a secondhand calculation, not something the original authors stated themselves.

What they found

people took part

The primary paper (Church, Piña, Reategui & Brooks, 'Single-Session Reduction of the Intensity of Traumatic Memories in Abused Adolescents After EFT: A Randomized Controlled Pilot Study,' Traumatology 18(3):73-79, 2012) reports raw means and F-statistics, not Cohen's d. Verbatim from its Table 1 (30-day follow-up, IES Total): control group pre 32.00±4.82 to post 31.38±3.84 versus experimental group pre 36.38±4.74 to post 3.38±2.60, F(1,14)=240.68, p<.001; intrusive-memories subscale F(1,14)=36.25, p<.001; avoidance subscale F(1,14)=159.30, p<.001. Independently recalculating Cohen's d from these posttest between-group means/SDs using a standard pooled-SD formula yields d≈8.5 (total), d≈5.1 (intrusive memories), d≈6.9 (avoidance) — in the same order of magnitude as the previously recorded 8.07/3.95/6.89 (from Sebastian & Nelms 2017's table) but not numerically identical, consistent with a legitimate but source-derived (not author-stated) calculation using a possibly different convention.

How the study worked

Who took partinstitutionalized male juveniles, physically/psychologically abused (n=16)

What they didIn a randomized controlled trial, participants were randomly assigned to receive tapping or a comparison condition, then measured and compared.

Compared withwaitlist

Measured withSUDS, IES

💡 Where this could help

Think of a teenage boy in an institutional setting, carrying the weight of abuse with few people trained to help him process it. If this very large effect is confirmed by more research, it points toward a single session teaching a skill he can then use on his own — meaningful relief for a population that institutional systems often struggle to reach with sustained, staff-intensive therapy.

🔬 What to study next

Given how large this single-session effect appears, the priority is simply replication at scale with objective corroboration — cortisol or HRV measured before and after the single session, plus a longer follow-up than 30 days, in a larger sample of institutionalized or abused adolescents — to see whether an effect this dramatic and this rapid holds up outside a very small pilot. If it does, it would be worth testing whether facility staff, not just trained clinicians, can deliver the single session effectively.

The full record

Design	Randomized trial
Participants	16 people
Population	institutionalized male juveniles, physically/psychologically abused
Comparison group	waitlist
Effect size	Cohen's d (IES total, derived) = 8.07 (95% CI 5.11-11.03) — on PTSD/trauma symptoms, EFT vs waitlist (between-group, posttest); this is a value derived/calculated by the secondary meta-analysis source (Sebastian & Nelms 2017) from the primary paper's raw means/SDs — the primary paper itself reports only F-statistics, not a Cohen's d
Outcome measures	SUDS, IES
Journal	Original publication venue not confirmed (indexed via Sebastian & Nelms 2017 Table 1/2)
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., Piña, O., Reategui, C., & Brooks, A. (2012). PTSD trial in institutionalized abused male juveniles (as tabulated in Sebastian & Nelms 2017). https://doi.org/10.1177/1534765611426788

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 PTSD & Trauma · Trauma (other)