The Effect of the Emotional Freedom Technique on Students

Zonguldak Bulent Ecevit University

Status: Unknown

Conditions: Coping Skills; Complementary Therapies; Anxiety; Stress

Treatments: Other: Complementary Therapies

Study type: Interventional

Funder types: Other

Identifiers

NCT05227560

ZngldkBEU

Details and patient eligibility

About

Introduction: The interruption of education within the scope of quarantine and isolation methods during the pandemic process has caused nursing students studying in clinical practice areas to be away from the clinic for a long time. This situation not only affected the anxiety levels of nursing students, but also caused them to feel inadequate and to experience stress.

Purpose: The aim of this study is to investigate the effect of emotional freedom technique on nursing students' styles of coping with anxiety and stress.

Method:In this experimentally designed study with pretest-posttest control group, freedom of emotion technique will be applied to the experimental group for 4 sessions. In the pre-implementation phase and after the emotional freedom technique session, the state anxiety scale, coping styles scale, and subjective discomfort level scale will be applied.

Full description

Emotional Freedom Technique (EFT), a type of energy that has been applied recently, is a technique applied by touching meridian points to provide anxiety, depression, burnout, stress management, and desensitization to fear. The basic principle of EFT is to send activation and deactivation signals to the brain by stimulating points on the skin with different electrical properties, usually by touching them. The findings obtained from the studies show that this technique, which is a psychotherapeutic technique and provides cognitive restructuring, has statistically significant improvements at the rate of 98% in the management of psychological problems. Studies show that this approach is positive in coping with stress when considered in a wide range. Church et al. revealed that self-administered EFT provides significant improvements in anxiety, depression, pain and craving scores. A large therapeutic effect for EFT was reported in a meta-analysis of 14 randomized controlled trials using the EFT technique for anxiety disorders. In the studies, it was aimed to apply this application, which has proven positive results, to apply the emotional freedom technique in order to reduce the anxiety experienced by the students due to the reasons such as distance education and clinical education during the COVID-19 pandemic process and to enable them to cope with stress.

research questions

This study aims to address the following research questions:

What are the anxiety levels of the students who applied the emotional freedom technique (EFT)? What are the stress coping styles of the students who applied emotional freedom technique (EFT)?

Enrollment: 80 estimated patients

Sex: All

Volunteers: Accepts Healthy Volunteers

Inclusion criteria

• Not receiving any psychiatric diagnosis,
• Not receiving any therapy for coping with anxiety and stress,
• Not applying emotional freedom technique before,
• Not being in the COVID-19 diagnosis, treatment care process, and
• Participating in the study determined to be voluntary.

Exclusion criteria

-Not participating in any of the EFT sessions and being diagnosed with COVID-19.

Trial design

Primary purpose: Basic Science

Allocation: Randomized

Interventional model: Parallel Assignment

Masking: Double Blind

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80 participants in 2 patient groups

Emotional Freedom Technique group

Experimental group

Description:

Personal characteristics questionnaire, State Anxiety Scale (SQS) and Stress Coping Styles Scale (SST) were applied to the intervention group at the pre-test stage. Subjective discomfort level scale (ERDS) was also applied to the intervention group before EFT was applied. After four sessions of EFT, "DKO", "SBO", "ORDS" were applied to the intervention group again in the post-test phase.

Treatment:

Other: Complementary Therapies

Control

No Intervention group

Description:

Participants in the control group received no intervention throughout the study.