Thought Field Therapy Compared to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Wait-List for Agoraphobia: A Randomized, Controlled Study with a 12-Month Follow-up

Randomized trial👥 72 participants⚖️ vs. cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT); waitlistHigher rigor✓ Source-checked📍 Norway

In plain English. Seventy-two people with agoraphobia were randomly assigned to Thought Field Therapy (a tapping-based approach), CBT, or a waiting list, with an independent, blinded rater checking their progress. Both active treatments clearly beat waiting, and tapping held its own against CBT with no significant difference between them a year later. This is a well-designed, blinded-assessment randomized trial, one of the stronger pieces of evidence in the tapping literature for a specific anxiety disorder.

What they found

people took part

Both CBT and TFT showed significantly better results than waitlist (p < 0.001) at post-treatment, with no significant differences between CBT and TFT at post-treatment (p = 0.33) or 12-month follow-up (p = 0.90).

How the study worked

Who took partpatients with agoraphobia (n=72)

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); waitlist

Measured withAnxiety Disorders Interview Scale (blinded interviewer rating)

💡 Where this could help

Think of someone whose agoraphobia has shrunk their world to their own front door, waiting months for a CBT therapist with an opening. If tapping-based approaches continue to hold their own against CBT as they did here, it could give people a comparably effective option that, once learned, doesn't require repeat visits to a scarce or booked-out specialist to keep practicing.

🔬 What to study next

With a 12-month follow-up already showing TFT holding as durable as CBT, the compelling next step is testing whether that durability shows up physiologically during real-world exposure — ambulatory heart-rate or HRV monitoring while someone actually faces an agoraphobic trigger, rather than relying only on clinical interview scores. Testing whether combining TFT with graded real-world exposure accelerates recovery further would also be worth chasing, given how disabling agoraphobia can be while someone waits for treatment.

The full record

Design	Randomized trial
Participants	72 people
Population	patients with agoraphobia
Comparison group	cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT); waitlist
Outcome measures	Anxiety Disorders Interview Scale (blinded interviewer rating)
Journal	Frontiers in Psychology
Year	2017
Country	Norway
Language	English
Method	Thought Field Therapy (related tapping method)
Publication type	Study / trial
Verification	✓ Confirmed against the primary source

Read the original study →

Cite this study

APA

Irgens, A. (2017). Thought Field Therapy Compared to Cognitive Behavioral Therapy and Wait-List for Agoraphobia: A Randomized, Controlled Study with a 12-Month Follow-up. Frontiers in Psychology. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2017.01027

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 · Phobias