The paper
L.D. de Voogd et al., “Eye-movement intervention enhances extinction via amygdala deactivation,” J Neurosci, 38:8694–706, 2018.
Some psychotherapists coach patients to recall traumatic memories as they make back-and-forth eye movements, tracking the therapist’s hand. The procedure, eye movement desensitization and reprocessing (EMDR), helps lessen the power of those memories, but how it works “has been kind of unknown,” says psychologist Joseph Dunsmoor of the University of Texas at Austin.
Lycia de Voogd of Radboud University in the Netherlands and her colleagues sought to integrate EMDR and a form of conditioning known as fear extinction, a way of lessening fear through repeated exposure to a stimulus. They gave 24 healthy subjects electric shocks to their fingers as the participants looked at blocks of color on a screen. The next day, the participants simply looked at the blocks, with or without tracking a moving dot with their eyes for 10 ...
