Psychological + cognitive explanations

• Family dysfunction: Schizophrenogenic mother

  Cold rejecting mother creates tension + secrecy at home

  Child feels distrust and instability

  Results in delusions of percecution
• Family dysfunction: Expressed emotion


  High levels of negativity expressed emotion towards child like verbal criticism

  Increases chance of SZ
• family dysfunction: double bind theory

  Children receive mixed messages e.g praised and criticised simultaneously

  child punished for anything they do

  Develops confusing veiw of world and delusions of persecution
• Cognitive explanations 


  SZ characterised by disruption to healthy mental processing
• Poor meta representation 


  -Ability to reflect on thoughts+ behaviour of others and self

  -inability to decipher wether thought is own or other

  -auditory hallucinations
• Poor central control


  -ability to suppress automatic responses performing deliberate actions

  -poor ‘CC’ is lack of suppression and appear behaviour out of control

  -disorganised speech and speech poverty. - tested using stroop test: incongruent words and color to suppress auto response
• Strength of family dysfunction as a psychological explanation for SZ

  Support: review records of SZ patients found family history of abuse, abuse explains SZ as trauma more than specific explanations
• weakness of family dysfunction as a psychological explanation for SZ

  Methodological limitations of studies: info about childhood is self report post diagnosis (bias or memory loss). However children analysed with abuse and found high rates of abuse and Sz development
• Weakness of family dysfunction as a psychological explanation for SZ

  Little research: schizophrenogenic mother + double bind no support. Many SZ patients actually had supportive mothers
• Weakness of family dysfunction as a psychological explanation for SZ

  Ethics: dysfunctional family explanations led to parent blaming especially on mothers (socially sensitive)
• Strength of Central control as a cog explanation for psychological explanations of SZ

  Research support: Stroop test, Sz patients and non SZ patients compared time to complete, SZ took twice as long which supports CC
• Weakness of cognitive explanations as a psychological explanation for SZ

  Cog doesnt fully explain cause: research only found correlations and rely on neural explanations > cog needs biological support to explain SZ (cannot be used in isolation)