Psychological Explanations of Schizophrenia

• Family Dysfunction


  Abnormal processes within a family such as poor communication and cold parenting that contribute to developing schizophrenia
• Cognitive Explanation of Schizophrenia


  Explanations that focus on mental processes such as thinking, language and attention
• Dysfunctional Thought Processing 


  Information processing that does not represent reality accurately and produces undesirable consequences
• Schizophrenogenic Mother

  • Mother that is cold, rejecting and controlling
  • Creates an environment that is full of tension and secrecy
  • Leads to distrust that later develops into paranoid delusions leading to schizo
• Double Bind Theory

  • Child are trapped in situations where they fear to do the wrong thing as they receive mixed messages
  • Child is punished by withdrawal of love
  • Leads to disorganised thinking and paranoid delusions
• Expressed emotion

  • Negative emotions expressed towards the patient by the family
  • Verbal criticism which may be accompanied by violence
  • Hostility towards patient including rejection and anger
  • Emotional over involvement including needless self sacrifice
  • Leads to stress and leads to high relapse rates
• AO3 Family Dysfunction: Support from Double Bind Theory

  • Schizophrenics reported a higher recall of double bind statements by their mothers compared to non schizophrenics
  • May not be reliable as the patients recall may be affected by the schizophrenia itself undermining these findings
• AO3 Family Dysfunction: Research Support

  • Indicators of family dysfunction include insecure attachment and exposure to childhood trauma such as abuse
  • Schizophrenic adults are more likely to have insecure attachment
  • More than half of the schizo men and women have had an account of physical and sexual abuse
  • Family dysfunction makes people more vulnerable to schizo
• AO3 Family Dysfunction: Validity undermined and parent blaming

  • Information about childhood experiences has generally been gathered after the development of symptoms
  • Schizophrenia itself may have distorted the patients recall of childhood experiences which raises the problem of validity undermining the explanation
  • The dysfunctional family explanation has historically led to 'parent blaming' raising ethical issues
  • Parents have gone through the trauma of watching their children develop schizophrenia and bear the lifelong responsibility for their care
• AO3 Family Dysfunction: Issue with cause and effect

  • Having a schizophrenic within the family can be stressful and problematic on family relationships itself
  • Rather than dysfunctions within the families causing schizophrenia, it may well be that having someone with the disorder leads to family dysfunction as they struggle to cope
  • This is a major issue with correlational data as you cannot be certain of cause and effect
• AO3 Family Dysfunction: Real World Application

  • Supported by family therapy which successfully focus on reducing expressed emotions within the family
  • Leads to low relapse rates when compared with other therapies suggesting the explanation does have validity
  • However it could be argued that this merely masks the symptoms or teaches family members to tolerate them
  • It does not provide an effective solution for the disorder
• AO3 Family Dysfunction: Explanations lack support

  • Poor evidence base for any of the explanations
  • There is no research support for schizophrenogenic mother
  • Theories are based on clinical observations of patients
  • Family explanations have not been able to account for the link between childhood trauma and schizo
• Dysfunctional Thinking

  • Schizo leads to disruption to normal thought processing
  • Reduced thought processing in the ventral striatum is associated with negative symptoms
  • Reduced processing of information in the temporal and cingulate gyrus are associated with hallucinations
• Metarepresentation dysfunction

  • The cognitive ability to reflect on thoughts and behaviours
  • Allow us insight into our own intentions and goals and interpret the actions of others
  • Dysfunction of this would disrupt our ability to recognise our own actions as being carried out ourselves or by someone else
  • Explains hallucinations such as hearing voices and delusions such as thought insertion
• Central Control Dysfunction

  • Issues with the cognitive ability to suppress automatic responses while performing deliberate actions
  • Speech poverty and thought disorder could result from the inability to suppress automatic thoughts and speech triggered by other thoughts
  • People with schizo experience derailment of thoughts as each word trigger associations that they cannot suppress
• AO3 Cognitive Explanations: Research Support

  • Information is processed differently in the mind of schizophrenics
  • 30 patients with schizo were compared with 30 without schizo on a range of cognitive tasks one of which included the Stroop test
  • Tests their ability to suppress words as patients name the colors of words rather than reading the words which are named colors
  • Patients with the disorder took over twice as long as the control group to name the font colours supporting cognitive explanations of the disorder
  • Cognitive processes of people with schizo are impaired
• AO3 Cognitive Explanations: Unclear the origins of schizophrenia

  • It does not tell us anything about the origins of abnormal cognitions
  • It could be argued that dysfunctional thought processes are merely symptoms of a biological cause rather than the cause itself which undermines this explanation
  • Both biological and psychological factors separately produce the same symptoms raising questions of validity and whether both outcomes are schizophrenia
• AO3 Cognitive Explanations: Real World Application

  • Dysfunctional cognition can better characterise schizophrenia
  • Presents real world applications as we can look to construct a specific cognitive deficit profile to help with the diagnosis of the disorder
  • Including cognitive impairment within the diagnosis criteria for schizophrenia would help improve the poor reliability in diagnosis of the disorder
  • Then helps creating more targeted treatment to better treat schizo
• AO3 Cognitive Explanations: Psychological or Biological

  • The cognitive approach provides an excellent explanation for the symptoms of schizo
  • Therefore an argument for seeing schizo as a psychological condition
  • But it appears that the abnormal cognition associated with schizo is partly genetic in origin and the result of abnormal brain development
  • This would suggest schizo is biological