A Randomized Controlled Comparison of Emotional Freedom Technique and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy to Reduce Adolescent Anxiety: A Pilot Study

Randomized trial👥 63 participants⚖️ vs. cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and no-intervention controlHigher rigor✓ Source-checked📍 United States

In plain English. Sixty-three students between 10 and 18 years old with anxiety were split into three groups: tapping, standard cognitive behavioral therapy, or no help at all, with three sessions spread over five months. Both tapping and CBT beat doing nothing, and tapping performed similarly to CBT overall (no clear winner between the two). This study is notable for its unusually careful, low-bias design compared to many other tapping studies — independent blinded assessments and low dropout — which makes its comparable-to-CBT finding more trustworthy than most.

What they found

people took part

63 students were randomized to EFT (n=20), CBT (n=21), or no intervention (n=21) over 3 sessions across 5 months; the no-intervention group had significantly higher anxiety than EFT (p<0.01) at follow-up, but EFT did not significantly differ from CBT (p=0.18), and this was the only study in a 2025 systematic review rated as low risk of bias across all domains.

How the study worked

Who took partstudents aged 10-18 with anxiety, in schools (n=63)

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

Compared withcognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and no-intervention control

Measured withRevised Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale (RCMAS)

💡 Where this could help

Picture a middle schooler with anxiety whose family can't access or afford weekly CBT sessions with a specialist. If tapping continues to perform comparably to CBT in careful, low-bias trials like this one, its real advantage is that it doesn't require a specialist every week — a school counselor could teach it once, and the student could keep practicing it alone, potentially widening access to effective anxiety care in schools that can't provide full CBT programs.

🔬 What to study next

As the only study rated low risk of bias across all domains in a recent systematic review, this trial deserves a larger, similarly rigorous follow-up that adds objective measures, cortisol, heart rate variability, or sleep actigraphy, in anxious adolescents, to see whether tapping's parity with CBT holds up biologically as well as on the anxiety scale used here. It would also be worth testing whether school counselors, after being trained once, can sustain this effect when delivering it to larger groups of students over a full school year.

The full record

Design	Randomized trial
Participants	63 people
Population	students aged 10-18 with anxiety, in schools
Comparison group	cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT) and no-intervention control
Outcome measures	Revised Children's Manifest Anxiety Scale (RCMAS)
Journal	Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine
Year	2017
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

Gaesser, A.H., & Karan, O.C. (2017). A Randomized Controlled Comparison of Emotional Freedom Technique and Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy to Reduce Adolescent Anxiety: A Pilot Study. Journal of Alternative and Complementary Medicine. https://doi.org/10.1089/acm.2015.0316

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 Test Anxiety & Students