Treatment options will improve performance of children and adolescents on emotion recognition tasks, specifically response time as there is no difficulty recognizing human emotions. The degree of required treatments vary depending on the degree of ADD or ADHD the individual has. Treatment for these types of behaviors should include the parents as it is evident that their parenting skills impact on how their child deals with their symptoms, especially when at a younger age. Parents going through a parenting skills training program were reported a decrease in internalizing and externalizing behavior in their children post-training program. The program included learning how to give positive attention, increase good behavior with small frequent rewards and specific praise as well as learning how to decrease attention when the child behaved poorly. Effect on cognition
In recent years, many researchers have been interested in exploring the relationship between emotional disorders and cognition. Evidence has revealed that there is a relationship between the two. Strauman (1989) investigated how emotional disorders shape a persons cognitive structure, that is, the mental processes people utilize to make sense of the world around them. He recruited three groups of individuals: those with social phobias, those with depression, and controls with no emotional disorder diagnosis. He wanted to determine whether these groups had a cognitive structure showing an actual/ideal (AI) discrepancy (referring to an individual not believing that they have achieved their personal desires) or actual/own/other (AOO) discrepancy (referring to an individuals actions not living up to what their significant other believes that they need to be).
He found that depressed individuals had the highest AI discrepancy and social phobics had the greatest AOO discrepancy, while the controls were lower or in between the two for both discrepancies.Specific cognitive processes (e.g., attention) may be different in those with emotional disorders. MacLeod, Mathews, and Tata (1986) tested the reaction times of 32 participants, some of whom were diagnosed with Generalized Anxiety disorder, when presented with threatening words. They found that when threatening words were presented, people with greater anxiety tended to have increased selective attention, meaning that they reacted quicker to a stimulus in an area where a threatening word was just presented (32-59ms faster). When in the control group, subjects reacted slower when there was a threatening word proceeding the stimulus (16-32ms slower).Emotional disorders can also alter the way people regulate their emotions. Joormann and Gotlib (2010) conducted a study with depressed, or previously depressed, individuals to test this. They found that, when compared to individuals who have never had a depressive episode, previously and currently depressed individuals tended to use maladaptive emotion regulation strategies (such as rumination or brooding) more. They also found that when depressed individuals displayed cognitive inhibition (slowing of response to a variable that had been previously ignored) when asked to describe a negative word (ignored variable was a positive word), they were less likely to ruminate or brood. When they displayed cognitive inhibition when asked to describe a positive word (ignored variable was a negative word), they were more likely to reflect.