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Eye Movement Desensitization Reprocessing (EMDR) is a controversial treatment for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder that requires clients to make rapid eye movements while revisualizing a traumatic event. Although seemingly effective, the process by which EMDR exerts its effects is poorly understood. We propose that EMDR's eye movements facilitate the orienting response, i.e., the attentional adjustment to unexpected stimuli. Since the orienting response has been implicated in spontaneous transformations of dream content during REM sleep, we reasoned that, similarly, activation of the orienting response during EMDR may facilitate content transformations in traumatic memories. To examine this hypothesis, 25 undergraduates completed 20 seconds of eye movements or 20 seconds of visual fixation before each of two tasks: 1) a covert visual attention task, in which a cue indicated the likely position of a subsequent target, and 2) a sentence rating task, in which sentences with either metaphoric or non-metaphoric endings

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