doi: 10.9769/EPJ.2010.2.1.HB
By Harvey Baker
Abstract
Church (2009) studied basketball free-throw performance of college varsity athletes, comparing (a) a brief treatment of Emotional Freedom Techniques (EFT) with (b) an encouraging talk. A re-examination of Church’s data supported his conclusion that the EFT treatment led to relatively better performance compared with the control group.
In addition, we found (a) the reported improvement within the EFT condition was not significant, whereas the control condition decrement was significant and robust; (b) the positive effect of EFT thus took the form of an avoidance of the strong performance decrement seen in the control group; and (c) men and women contributed about equally to these findings.
To avoid an apparent ceiling effect, future researchers should use a more difficult free-throw task. Because this apparent ceiling effect may have caused the distribution of scores to deviate from normality, we confirmed the above reported findings from parametric analyses using nonparametric tests.
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