Are eye movements necessary?
An early critical review and metanalysis that looked at the contribution of eye movements to treatment effectiveness in EMDR concluded that eye movements are not necessary to the treatment effect.[64][65] However, recent research has demonstrated that when the eye movement component of EMDR is removed from the method the procedure is less effective.[66]. This finding supports previous research that has demonstrated that EMDR with eye movements is more effective than treatment conditions that do not utilise eye movements in the method [67][68][69], or instead use a dual attention task such as tapping[70].
