In the world, there are many people who face traumatic events at least once in their lives. Specifically, in the United States, there are a majority of people that face traumatic events. Those traumatic events may impact their lives in a negative way which makes them develop specific symptoms. Traumatic events such as motor vehicle accidents, interpersonal violence, sexual abuse, and terrorist attacks may affect people, and cause them to develop Post-Traumatic stress disorders (PTSD). It also may affect their emotional behavior. After extensive research, studies are proving that there are different approaches to treating PTSD, one of them improving cognitive awareness.

PTSD can be related to emotional behavior because PTSD is a disorder that is caused by a traumatic event. When a person faces a traumatic event, they develop a fear that they longer cannot control. Emotional processing of fear is very important in this situation because a traumatized person may or may not have the ability to process the traumatic event. By confronting similar traumatic events, the person is processing its fear. According to one scholarly article, “it is argued that some form of exposure to feared situations is common to many psychotherapies for anxiety, and that confrontation with feared objects or situations is an effective treatment” (Kozak et al., 1986). The best way for children and adolescents to deal with PTSD can be by confronting their fear through an event. This treatment also can work in adults that faced a traumatic event. In the field of Psychology, there has been more emphasis on fear as a structure or process of the mind. The structure of fear is to escape a traumatic event. Every person that faces a traumatic event begins to try to escape similar situations. Kozak explains that “if the fear structure is indeed a program to escape danger, we propose that it must involve information that stimuli and/or responses are dangerous, as well as information about physiological activity preparatory for escape” (Kozak at el., 1986). The fear caused by the stimuli elicits certain responses from PTSD patients which sciences are working to prevent.

There are many treatments that different scientists have been researching to treat PTSD. Studies show that Metacognitive therapy is one of the most effective treatments for PTSD. An article called “Metacognitive Therapy for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Youth: A Feasibility Study” discusses, however, that there is no evidence that these treatments can be used to treat PTSD in young people. Michael Simons and Anna-Lenna Kursawe tried to make a study to analyze if Metacognitive therapy is useful to treat PTSD in young people. According to Michael Simons, “Twenty- one children and adolescents (aged 8- 19 years) who were consecutively referred to the outpatient trauma clinic were treated with MCT” (Simons at el., 2019). In order to test if metacognitive therapy is useful, they selected a small group of young people. They divided the therapy between seven sessions, and found that the treatment was very effective, and many children completed the therapy in five sessions. “Even the youngest patient, an eight-year-old girl with chronic PTSD after a house fire, completed therapy successfully after only five sessions” (Simons et al, 2019). This shows that this treatment is capable of reducing PTSD in children and adolescents, as 85-95% of patients were found to have recovered (Simons et al., 2019). However, like many other treatments, metacognitive therapy did not work in every individual suffering PTSD symptom. “Only six patients were available at follow up, but their improvements were found to be stable” (Simons et al., 2019). For the six patients that metacognitive therapy did not work effectively compared to the others, the improvement was maintained, meaning that they continue with the cognitive therapy.

Another treatment to reduce PTSD in children and adolescents is the Cognitive Behavior therapy. This is a psychosocial intervention that improves mental health. This treatment has been demonstrated to be effective for a range of problems including anxiety, depression, and PTSD. It focuses on challenging and changing unhelpful cognitive behavior. PTSD can affect children’s social and academic functioning. Also, PTSD can get worse and have a chronic course for at least five years. To test that this treatment can be used to reduce PTSD in children and adolescent, they created an experiment, but this experiment is very different from others because is a preliminary randomized controlled trial, which means that they chose random people to make the experiment. According to the article “Cognitive Behavioral Therapy for PTSD in Children and Adolescents: A Preliminary Randomized Controlled Trial,” “CBT (which included anxiety management components such as coping skills training and joint work with parents) with children 3-16 years old is effective in reducing symptoms of PTSD and externalizing symptoms” (Smith et al., 2007). The method for this treatment was based on following a four-week symptom monitoring period, twenty-four children and young people met the criteria of PTSD disorder. The treatment was tested throughout a ten-week course for each individual. After ten weeks, the patients showed greater improvements in the reduction of their symptoms. Additionally, in another research, a meta-analysis was used to examine the efficacy of the cognitive behavioral therapy. In this meta-analysis, eight randomized trials were used. All the trials that Joanna Kowalik used showed that cognitive behavioral therapy is an effective treatment for PTSD in children and young people. In the trials, they used two different groups; the first group was the patients that used cognitive behavioral therapy and the other group was the control group. With these two groups, they could analyze that cognitive behavioral therapy is an effective treatment. Doing research to analyze this type of treatment, they tried to make as many experiments as they could to make sure the treatment is effective, and we can see this by looking at the different trials Joanna Kowalik used.

Another treatment that it is used to treat PTSD is increasing the cognitive control. Individuals that are exposed to trauma develop some PTSD symptoms, but few of them develop PTSD. Although this study does not focus on children and adolescents, either way it focuses on analyzing a treatment for PTSD. To make sure increasing the cognitive control is a good treatment to treat PTSD, they make an experiment with military members. “Study participants were 21 military service member who were initially scanned within 8 weeks of returning from at least a 90- day deployment to either Iraq or Afghanistan and for a second time between 6 and 12 months later” (White et al., 2018). Doing these types of experiments, scientists try to choose a specific study group to make the experiment. Scientists administer the treatment for a sufficient amount of time. In this case, the treatment was measured in eight weeks, but they did the experiment two times. After the first time, they took six to twelve months to measure the experiment for a second time. By looking at the experiment, they analyzed that PTSD symptoms are the result of emotional information that can interfere with the cognitive process. A method that they use to decrease the level of symptoms is the Stroop task. “The goal of the current study was to determine the neural correlates of changing PTSD symptoms level using the affect Stroop task in those with recent exposure to combat stress” (Smith et al., 2018). The Stroop task is a demonstration in a reaction time of a task. The Stroop task works by naming the ink color of a color word. For example, the word RED is printed in BLUE ink. This is the method that they used to combat stress. This Stroop task increases the cognitive control because it allows your brain to process and make decisions based on what people have learned.

Furthermore, an article called “Improving Cognitive Control in Adolescents with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder” shows one method to improve cognitive control which is working memory task. “The primary aim of the present study was to investigate the possibility of improving cognitive control in adolescents suffering from PTSD using an a WMT task” (Schweizer et al., 2017). In this task, people with PTSD are able to remember and use relevant information while in the middle of an activity. For this task, they used twenty sessions of training in order to improve cognitive control. This type of task can be found online for free and is available for every person. In order to measure cognitive control, they chose thirty adolescents to detect if the working memory task is useful to improve cognitive control. The working memory task is very useful for increasing cognitive control treatment because the task would help PTSD patients to acquire knowledge and improve their mind processes.

These treatments for PTSD are very important because for their measurements, they used small size groups. For the first treatment which is Metacognitive therapy they used twenty-one patients. For the second treatment which is cognitive behavioral therapy they used twenty-four patients, and for the last treatment which is increasing cognitive behavioral they used twenty-one members. In these measurements, it shows that the treatment is very accurate in order to treat PTSD. Studying cognitive behavior helps scientists develop better treatments for patients suffering from PTSD. Based off of the results from different therapeutic approaches, improving cognitive behavior shows extremely promising results in the treatment of PTSD. These different treatments may help reduce PTSD symptoms in patients, while at the same time help them to learn how to combat their own fear.

Work Cited

Foa, E. B., & Kozak, M. J. (1986). Emotional processing of fear: Exposure to corrective information.  Psychological Bulletin, 99(1), 20-35. http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/0033-2909.99.1.20

Joanna Kowalik, Jennifer Weller, Jacob Venter, David Drachman, Cognitive behavioral therapy for the    treatment of pediatric posttraumatic stress disorder: A review and meta-analysis, Journal of      Behavior Therapy and Experimental Psychiatry, Volume 42, Issue 3, 2011, Pages 405-413, ISSN0005-7916, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jbtep.2011.02.002

PATRICK SMITH, WILLIAM YULE, SEAN PERRIN, TROY TRANAH, TIM DALGLEISH, DAVID  M. CLARK, Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy for PTSD in Children and Adolescents: A  Preliminary Randomized Controlled Trial, Journal of the American Academy of Child Adolescent Psychiatry, Volume 46, Issue 8, 2007, Pages 1051-1061, ISSN 0890-8567           https://doi.org/10.1097/CHI.0b013e318067e288

Simons, M and Kursawe A-L (2019) Metacognitive Therapy for Posttraumatic Stress Disorder in Youth:  A Feasibility Study. Front. Psychol. 10:264. Doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00264         https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.00264

Stuart F. White, Michelle E. Costanzo, Laura C. Thornton, Alita M. Mobley, James R. Blair, Michael J. Roy, Increased cognitive control and reduced emotional interference is associated with reduced            PTSD symptom severity in a trauma-exposed sample: A preliminary longitudinal study,   Psychiatry Research: Neuroimaging, Volume 278, 2018, Pages 7-12, ISSN 0925-4927,  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.pscychresns.2018.06.006.

Susanne Schweitzer, Zobair Samimi, Jafar Hasani, Alireza Moradi, Fatemeh Mirdoraghi, Mohammad Khaleghi, Improving cognitive control in adolescents with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), Behaviors Research and Therapy, Volume 93, 2017, Pages 88-94, ISSN 0005-7967, https://doi.org/10.1016/j.brat.2017.03.017