Secondly of all, we were interested to see if the strength in the physical task for the finger musculature, when people twice self-generate their anxiety,

will change from T1 to T2 in the respective Tivantinib groups. The results provided primary evidence that the wingwave method is able to enhance participants’ strength if inducing an anxious memory. Congruent with our hypothesis, data demonstrated that the strength in the experimental group was significantly enhanced from T1 to T2, and there were no significant differences in the control group. Thus, it seems that the wingwave method is helpful in enhancing physical strength in a task for the finger musculature when participants self-generate the emotion of anxiety. However, Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical the rationale Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical for this mechanism is not

clear at the current time, which is a limitation of this study. Further studies have to find out a biological explanation for this result. One possible explanation might be that the participants can better deal with their anxiety after the intervention. Thus, the anxious memory Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical is afterwards not more connected to feelings like to be paralyzed with anxiety, which might be the cause for a reduced strength prior to the intervention. Third of all, we also checked participant’s state and trait anxiety which were recorded with the STAI (Laux et al. 1981) and consisted of the following two nondependent scales: The state-anxiety scale (STAI-G Form X1) and the trait-anxiety scale (STAI-G Form X2). The results of the ANOVAS for both scales showed a significant interaction Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical between the group and the time of measurement. The values in the experimental group decreased significantly from T1 to T2 in both scales and the values in the control group were unchanged from T1 to T2. Thus, the wingwave method seems to be a very powerful method to reduce state anxiety as well as trait anxiety. Similar results could be found by Graham and Robinson (2007) who found that Inhibitors,research,lifescience,medical EMDR can decrease significantly state anxiety in swimmers who had experienced a traumatic swimming event. This result is also in line with De Jongh et al. (2002) who found that EMDR is an effective treatment

alternative for anxiety and can reduce this emotion. To the best of our knowledge, we could show for the first time that a technique like the wingwave method which uses EMDR as main intervention tool cannot only decrease participants’ state anxiety but also participants’ trait anxiety. As a first study limitation, the induction of anxiety in our GSK-3 pilot study has his weaknesses. We only used subjective measures of anxiety by using our different scales. Future studies can also include objective measures of anxiety (e.g., galvanic skin response, heart rate or an electromyogram) to increase the validity of the study. As a second study limitation, we have to say that in the present study, we investigated the possibility to reduce anxiety in general using the wingwave method.