Erasing memory traces of trauma with eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy

W ith its open access character, the European Journal of Psychotraumatology aims to promote evidence-based treatments around the world, while at the same time welcoming new forms of treatment without losing its critical scientific eye. Eye movement desensitization and reprocessing therapy (EMDR) is by now a well-established treatment for posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD). There is good evidence for its efficacy and together with trauma-focused cognitive behavioral therapy (TF-CBT) it is considered to be the first-line treatment for PTSD 2013). All these effective psychotherapies for PTSD have many key elements in common (Schnyder et al., 2015). EMDR is as effective as other forms of trauma-focused psychotherapy and a recent meta-analysis has shown EMDR even to be slightly superior to TF-CBT for reduction of intrusion and arousal symptoms (Chen, Zhang, Hu, & Liang, 2015). EMDR treatment has also been shown to be efficacious in terms of symptom reduction in refugee Clients, clinicians, and researchers who are first introduced to the treatment method EMDR may raise an eyebrow upon hearing about the element of eye movements in this treatment. Surely, at first hearing, it is curious how the therapist will proceed to treat their traumatic memories with the help of eye movements. Regarding the working mechanism of EMDR, most support has been found for the working memory account that states that keeping a traumatic memory in mind and at the same time performing another task results in a competition for working memory resources (Andrade, Kavanagh, & Baddeley, 1997; Gunter & Bodner, 2008). This taxing of the working memory leads to decreased vividness and emotionality of the traumatic images. In this account, eye movements are explained as an essential factor in the efficacy of the treatment by its taxing effect and they may be replaced by various tasks that have a similar effect on working memory (Gunter & Bodner, 2008; Lee & Cuijpers, 2013). When we introduced this special issue, our aim was to identify high-quality studies that present novel findings on EMDR as a treatment method and its working mechanisms. This special issue includes three papers that further investigated the working mechanisms of EMDR in innovative ways, and a paper on a novel application of EMDR, in children with seizure-related anxiety and PTSD symptoms. With the application of a neuropsychological task of participants' reading span, Van Schie et al. (2016) investigated the effects of speed of eye movements in relationship to working memory …