Clond, M. · Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease · 2016
Across 14 RCTs and 658 participants, EFT produced a within-group pre-post effect size of 1.23 (95% CI 0.82-1.64, p<.001) on anxiety scores, significantly larger than the pooled within-group control-group effect size of 0.41 (95% CI 0.17-0.67, p=.001). This is a pre-post design contrast (EFT's own pre-post change vs. controls' own pre-post change), not a between-group EFT-minus-control effect size.
Pooling 14 randomized trials and nearly 700 people, this meta-analysis found people's anxiety dropped substantially more after EFT than after the pooled control conditions — one of the larger, better-supported syntheses in the entire tapping literature. A meta-analysis at this scale is what starts to convince skeptical clinicians and reviewers that an effect isn't a fluke of a few small, favorable studies.
If this pattern replicates in head-to-head comparisons, imagine someone with generalized anxiety who can't get a therapy appointment for months instead learning a technique in minutes that they administer themselves at home, indefinitely, with no clinician involved. It could especially open a door for people priced out of therapy or stuck on long mental-health waitlists.
This meta-analysis reports EFT's own pre-post change alongside control groups' pre-post change, but never directly computes the between-group effect size that would show EFT's edge over control most clearly — that calculation is the natural next step for a rerun of this pooled data. From there, adding objective anxiety markers — cortisol, heart-rate variability, amygdala reactivity on fMRI — across the pooled trials would test whether the psychological improvement is accompanied by a calming of the body's threat response, not just lower scores on a questionnaire.
| Design | Meta-analysis |
|---|---|
| Participants | 658 people |
| Population | adults with anxiety across 14 pooled RCTs meeting APA Division 12 Task Force criteria |
| Comparison group | combined controls (waitlist, other treatments) |
| Effect size | pre-post effect size (within-group) = 1.23 (95% CI 0.82-1.64) — on EFT anxiety scores, within-group pre-post change, not vs control; the paper separately reports a pooled control-group pre-post effect size of 0.41 (95% CI 0.17-0.67) for comparison, but does not compute a direct between-group EFT-vs-control effect size |
| Outcome measures | various validated anxiety instruments across pooled studies |
| Journal | Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease |
| Year | 2016 |
| Country | International |
| Language | English |
| Method | EFT / tapping |
| Publication type | Review or meta-analysis |
| Verification | ✓ Confirmed against the primary source |
Clond, M. (2016). Emotional Freedom Techniques for Anxiety: A Systematic Review with Meta-analysis. Journal of Nervous and Mental Disease. https://doi.org/10.1097/NMD.0000000000000483
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 Anxiety
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