Despite being a common and evidence-based therapy, Eye Movement Desensitization and Reprocessing (EMDR) — discovered serendipitously in 1987 by a psychologist while walking in the woods — it is unclear whether the eye movements in this treatment provide any additional benefits to patients struggling with fear-related disorders that are not readily achieved through traditional exposure therapy. The promise of EMDR is its potential to recode the emotional content of the traumatic memory itself<\/strong>.<\/p>\n Investigating the neurobiological mechanisms underlying EMDR in healthy men and women, Lycia de Voogd and colleagues found that both side-to-side eye movement and a working memory task independently deactivated the amygdala — a brain region critical for fear learning. The researchers show in a second experiment that this deactivation enhanced extinction learning<\/strong> — a cognitive behavioral technique that reduces the association between a stimulus and a fear response<\/strong>. The reduced amygdala activity is thought to be a consequence of less available resources since they are dedicated to making eye movements.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" From the Society for Neuroscience press release: Two human experiments published in\u00a0JNeurosci\u00a0demonstrate that a widely used yet controversial psychotherapy technique suppresses fear-related amygdala activity during recall of a traumatic memory…. Read more »<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[5,4,6,332],"tags":[42,47,48,549,122,443,93,12,51,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27378"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=27378"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27378\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":27511,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/27378\/revisions\/27511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=27378"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=27378"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=27378"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"\"](\"http:\/\/therapytoronto.ca\/news\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/07\/vision_eyesight.jpg\")
Two human experiments published in\u00a0JNeurosci\u00a0<\/em>demonstrate that a widely used yet controversial psychotherapy technique suppresses fear-related amygdala activity<\/strong> during recall of a traumatic memory<\/strong>.<\/p>\n