Turning conduct-disordered kids around

I'm reading through a treatment manual for child conduct (defiance) problems. Of interest, the manual points out that:

1) Children crave emotional engagement with their parents

2) Emotional engagement can involve positive emotions (parents showing excitement, surprise), or negative (parents showing anger, irritation, frustration). It doesn't matter to the child which emotions you show when you engage with them, as long as you're emotional

A key tenet of the manual is to make your discipline boring (unemotional), and swift, typically using time-out. If you are more emotionally charged when your children are behaving badly than when they are doing the right thing, you increase the likelihood that your child will continue to misbehave.