Does the Emotion Code work? What the research actually shows

Is there scientific evidence that the Emotion Code works?

Not in the sense that scientists use the word. As of September 2026 there is no randomized controlled trial of the Emotion Code in any peer-reviewed journal, and a search of PubMed, the US National Library of Medicine's research database, for the method's name returns no indexed study of it. The method's central idea, that the energy of past emotions becomes trapped in the body and can be released with a magnet, is not established by scientific evidence.

That does not mean people who tried it are mistaken about how they felt afterward. It means nobody has shown, under conditions that rule out other explanations, that the method itself made the difference. This page sets out what has been studied and what the gap means for someone deciding whether to try it.

Discover Healing, the company founded by Dr. Bradley Nelson that teaches and certifies the method, says something similar on its own legal page: that the method rests on Dr. Nelson's personal observations, has yet to be researched by the Western academic, medical and psychological communities, and is considered experimental.

What studies of the Emotion Code have been published?

The study most often cited is a 2021 paper by Yuliana Gelb and colleagues in the journal Alternative and Integrative Medicine. It followed 146 adults, 132 of them women, who were starting Emotion Code sessions for the first time. They completed standard questionnaires for depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress before and after their sessions, and their average scores went down.

The paper is candid about its limits, and they are large. Participants were recruited by Emotion Code practitioners from their own clients, people who had chosen and paid for sessions. The authors write that a comparison group was collected but did not match the treated group and was set aside. Every outcome was self-reported. Two of the four authors are listed with an Emotion Code healing business. The authors conclude that the study cannot show cause and effect and call for randomized trials with a control group.

The journal is not currently indexed for MEDLINE, according to the National Library of Medicine's catalog, so the paper has not been through the kind of scrutiny that would let anyone call the question settled.

Discover Healing's research page also describes a second self-reported study of 158 people before and after Heart-Wall sessions, a small preliminary study of the related Body Code for morning sickness in Japan, and a study in mice that the page says was prepared for Discover Healing. The human studies compare people with themselves before and after, with no sham or placebo comparison. At the time of writing, none of these could be found in PubMed. The company has announced further studies for 2026.

Why a before-and-after study cannot answer the question

People tend to look for help when they feel worst, and low points often ease with time whatever happens in between. Researchers call part of this regression to the mean. Add the natural wish to report that something you chose and paid for was worth it, and a drop in questionnaire scores is expected even from a method that does nothing specific.

This is why the National Center for Complementary and Integrative Health (NCCIH) calls the randomized, placebo-controlled trial the gold standard: comparing a treated group with a similar group given something that looks the same is the only way to tell whether the method itself did the work. A fair test of the Emotion Code would need:

• people randomly assigned to a real session or a sham session that looks and feels the same;
• outcome measures collected by someone who does not know which session each person had;
• a plan registered in advance, so results cannot be chosen after the fact;
• researchers without a financial stake in the method.

What does research on muscle testing show?

Every step of an Emotion Code session depends on muscle testing, a technique borrowed from applied kinesiology in which small changes in an arm's resistance are read as yes or no answers. So the research on muscle testing bears directly on the method. Our page on muscle testing covers it in more detail; the main findings are these.

• A 2008 review from the University of Southampton found 22 relevant studies, rated their methods as poor, and concluded there was insufficient evidence for the diagnostic accuracy of kinesiology or the validity of the muscle response.
• In a 2014 double-blind trial, 51 people were muscle tested while holding sealed vials, one of saline and one of a toxic solution. The toxic vial was identified 53 percent of the time, close to the 50 percent expected from guessing.
• A 1988 study compared three experienced applied kinesiologists with laboratory measures of nutrient levels and found their results no more useful than random guessing.
• A 2016 study from the University of Oxford is the most favorable: practitioners distinguished spoken lies from truths about 66 percent of the time with muscle testing, better than chance and better than their intuition alone. The authors caution that the result does not extend to other uses of muscle testing.
• A 2025 systematic review found that muscle testing combined with non-physical challenges, the kind of use energy methods rely on, showed no reliability and was not recommended for clinical use.

So why do some people say it helped them?

Many people who try the Emotion Code describe feeling lighter, calmer or more hopeful afterward, and there is no reason to doubt that they feel that way. Several well-studied influences can produce that experience without trapped emotions needing to be real.

• Expectation. NCCIH describes the placebo effect as a beneficial outcome that comes from a person's anticipation that something will help, and notes that the way a practitioner interacts with someone can itself bring a positive response. Placebo responses are real changes in how people feel, not imagination.
• A caring relationship. In psychotherapy research the quality of the relationship between helper and client is one of the most consistent predictors of how people fare; a 2018 meta-analysis of 295 studies found that link across very different kinds of therapy.
• A story that makes sense. Psychotherapy researcher Bruce Wampold has argued that much of what helps in therapy is shared across approaches: trust, an explanation the person finds convincing, and a hopeful expectation of change. An Emotion Code session offers all three.
• Ritual and acknowledgment. A calm, structured ritual with a clear ending, in which a feeling and a period of life are named, can give someone permission to set something down.
• Timing. Hard stretches often ease on their own, and whatever was tried last gets the credit.

What this means if you are considering it

Understanding these influences is a respectful way to explain why the Emotion Code can feel helpful. It is also why feeling better is not, by itself, evidence that its mechanism is real. If you value the practice as a reflective or spiritual ritual and understand what the evidence does and does not say, you can make an informed choice about it.

The line that matters is this: it should not replace care from a doctor or a licensed therapist for any health condition, and it should not be a reason to delay that care. NCCIH advises against using any practice that has not been shown to be effective as a reason to put off seeing a health care provider. Our page on whether the Emotion Code is safe covers this in more detail.

Laura Bass is a psychotherapist and a certified Emotion Code practitioner, and she keeps the two as separate pathways. If you want to talk it through, doubts included, you can ask Laura or read more about Emotion Code sessions with Laura. More skeptical questions are answered on our questions from skeptics page, and the whole series starts at the Emotion Code guide.

Common questions