Psychological Explanations

• Psychological Explanations


  Family Dysfunctions

  The Schizophrenogenic mother

  Fromm-Reichmann (1948) proposed a psychodynamic explanation for SZ based on a particular type of parent her clients spoke of which she called the schizophrenogenic mother. Characterised as cold, rejecting and controlling and tends to create a tense, secretive family climate. This leads to distrust which later develops into paranoid delusions and ultimately SZ.
• Psychological Explanations

  Family Dysfunctions

  Double-bind theory

  Bateson et al. (1972) emphasised the role of communication style within a family as a risk factor for SZ. The developing child is punished for doing the wrong thing w/ the withdrawal of love, but get mixed signals of what this is. This leaves them w/ an understanding of the world as confusing and dangerous, and this is reflected in symptoms like disorganised thinking and paranoid delusions.
• Psychological Explanations


  Family Dysfunctions

  Expressed Emotion (EE)

  Is the level of negative emotion expressed towards a person w/ SZ by their carers. Has several elements:

  • verbal criticism, occasionally accompanied by violence.
  • hostility towards the person, including anger and rejection
  • emotional over-involvement

  Source of stress for the patient, leading to triggering someone vulnerable and relapse.
• Psychological Explanations



  Cognitive Explanations

  Schizophrenia is characterised by disruption to normal thought processing. Reduced processing in the ventral striatum is associated w/ negative symptoms, whilst reduced processing of info in the temporal and cingulate gyri are associated w/ hallucinations.
• Psychological Explanations



  Cognitive Explanations

  Firth et al. (1992) identified 2 kinds of dysfunctional thought processing that could underlie some symptoms:

  • Metarepresentation - the cognitive ability to reflect on thoughts and behaviour. Dysfunction in metarepresentation would disrupt our ability to recognise our own actions and thoughts as being carried out by ourselves rather than someone else. This would explain hallucinations of voices and delusions like thought insertion.
• Psychological Explanations



  Cognitive Explanations

  Firth et al. (1992) identified 2 kinds of dysfunctional thought processing that could underlie some symptoms:

  • Central control - the cognitive ability to suppress automatic responses while we perform deliberate actions instead. Disorganised speech and thought disorder could result from the inability to suppress automatic thoughts and speech triggered by other thoughts.
• Psychological explanations - evaluation

  Support for family dysfunction as a risk factor. For example, Read et al. (2005) reviewed 46 studies of child abuse and SZ and concluded that 69% of adult women in-patients with a diagnosis of SZ had a history of physical abuse, sexual abuse or both in childhood. However, most of this evidence shares a weakness. Info about childhood experiences was gathered after the development of symptoms, and the SZ may have distorted patients' recall, which creates as serious problem for validity.
• Psychological explanations - evaluation 2


  Dysfunctional family explanations have led historically to parent-blaming. Parents, who have already observed their child's decent into SZ and who are likely to bear lifelong responsibility for their care, underwent further trauma by receiving blame for the condition.
• Psychological explanations - evaluation 3


  Strong evidence for dysfunctional information processing. Stirling et al. (2006) compared 30 people w/ a diagnosis of SZ with 18 controls on a range of cognitive tasks including the Stroop Test, in which ppts had to name the ink colours of colour words, supressing the impulse to read the words. People w/ SZ took twice as long to name the ink colours, supporting the idea that info is processed differently in the mind of the person w/ SZ.