How Therapeutic Tapping Can Alter Neural Correlates of Emotional Prosody Processing in Anxiety.

König König,Bliem Bliem,Seebacher Seebacher,Rossi Rossi,Von Prittwitz Von Prittwitz,Steber Steber

doi:10.3390/brainsci9080206

König König, Bliem Bliem + Show 4 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3390/brainsci9080206

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Abstract

Anxiety disorders are the most common psychological disorders worldwide resulting in a great demand of adequate and cost-effective treatment. New short-term interventions can be used as an effective adjunct or alternative to pharmaco- and psychotherapy. One of these approaches is therapeutic tapping. It combines somatic stimulation of acupressure points with elements from Cognitive Behavioral Therapy (CBT). Tapping reduces anxiety symptoms after only one session. Anxiety is associated with a deficient emotion regulation for threatening stimuli. These deficits are compensated e.g., by CBT. Whether Tapping can also elicit similar modulations and which dynamic neural correlates are affected was subject to this study. Anxiety patients were assessed listening to pseudowords with a different emotional prosody (happy, angry, fearful, and neutral) prior and after one Tapping session. The emotion-related component Late Positive Potential (LPP) was investigated via electroencephalography. Progressive Muscle Relaxation (PMR) served as control intervention. Results showed LPP reductions for negative stimuli after the interventions. Interestingly, PMR influenced fearful and Tapping altered angry prosody. While PMR generally reduced arousal for fearful prosody, Tapping specifically affected fear-eliciting, angry stimuli, and might thus be able to reduce anxiety symptoms. Findings highlight the efficacy of Tapping and its impact on neural correlates of emotion regulation.

Highlights

Anxiety disorders are the most common psychological disorders worldwide with a lifetime prevalence of 5–30% depending on the country [1] and often they are not treated in an adequate amount of time
Untreated anxiety disorders can result in a worsening of anxiety symptoms and the development of additional comorbid disorders like depression [2] or self-medication attempts [3], which can lead to many harmful consequences in the long run and decreases the likelihood of remission [2]
The results showed a reduced Late Positive Potential (LPP) in left centro-parietal areas while processing negative emotions after both interventions

Summary

Introduction

Anxiety disorders are the most common psychological disorders worldwide with a lifetime prevalence of 5–30% depending on the country [1] and often they are not treated in an adequate amount of time. Several short-term interventions have been developed in the past decades, which have shown to reduce symptoms of anxiety in only few sessions [4,5,6] and could be an approach to address this problem. They can be used in the context of anxiety treatment as an alternative or adjunct to. One of them is therapeutic Tapping, a rather new approach based on a method known as Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT) It was developed by Craig and Fowlie [7]

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