AO1 - Dysfunctional Thought Processing Schizophrenia

• Cognitive psychologists study mental processes such as memory, emotion, perception, attention and language. They describe how disruption of these processes may lead to some of the symptoms of schizophrenia.
• O’Farrell (2000) suggests that cognitive impairments accompany schizophrenia in 75% of cases.
• Cognitive impairments are often visible before the onset of schizophrenia, suggesting they are not a result of the disorder.
• Cognitive explanations of schizophrenia focus on faulty thinking and distorted beliefs.
• Cognitive processes include thinking, memory, attention and perception.
• People with schizophrenia are believed to have faulty mental processes and cognitive deficits.
• Hallucinations and delusions are problems with information processing.
• Many research studies have investigated the idea of cognitive deficits underlying the difficulties faced by schizophrenic patients, with regard to their memory, attention and executive functioning.
• Frith (1992) explained the symptoms of schizophrenia in terms of difficulty with information processing, specifically two difficulties; metarepresentation (ability to reflect on our thoughts, behaviour and experiences) and central control (ability to suppress our automatic responses to stimuli while we perform actions that reflect our wishes or intentions).
• Frith (1992) believed that positive symptoms (e.g. delusions or hallucinations) can be explained by metarepresentations, whereas negative symptoms can be explained in terms of central control.
• Bentall et al (1991) found that schizophrenics cannot distinguish between words they had heard and words they had come up with. This suggests that there are problems with metarepresentation.
• Stirling et al (2006) compared performance on a range of cognitive tasks in 30 people with schizophrenia and 30 people in a control group. Those with schizophrenia were found to struggle more suggesting that cognitive processes are impaired.
• According to Elvevag & Goldberg (2000) schizophrenia is better explained by cognitive deficits rather than symptoms. Memory and attention are the main core deficits, which provides support for this idea.
• Takahashi et al (2013) got people with and without schizophrenia to listen to tones and to try to tell them apart. They found that schizophrenic patients struggled with this task.
• Beck & Rector (2005) proposed a cognitive model in which there is an interaction of environmental, neurobiological, behavioural and cognitive factors that lead to cognitive deficits.
• Bowie & Harvey (2006) found that cognitive impairments were a core feature of schizophrenia, mainly affecting attention, working memory, verbal learning an executive function.
• Dysfunctional thought processing is an important part of the cognitive explanation for schizophrenia.
• Schizophrenia is characterised by disruption to normal thought processing and this can be seen in many of the symptoms.
• According to Simon et al (2015) reduced thought processing in the ventral striatum is associated with negative symptoms of schizophrenia, while reduced processing in the temporal and cingulate gyri is associated with hallucinations.
• Simon et al (2015) suggests that lower than usual levels of information processing in schizophrenic patients indicate that cognition is likely to be impaired.
• Healthy individuals are able to use metacognition to guide their thinking and problem solving. This is their awareness of how they are thinking and feeling, as well as their knowledge of when they have made a mistake.
• Patients with schizophrenia lose their awareness of metacognition which results in cognitive dysfunction. This often presents itself in positive symptoms such as hallucinations.
• Joshua et al (2009) used the Hayling sentence completion task to compare people with schizophrenia and bipolar disorder against healthy individuals. They found that people with schizophrenia were slower to respond and slower to suppress inappropriate responses.
• Joshua et al (2009) found that performance of people with schizophrenia is associated with higher ratings of cognitive disorganisation.
• Evans et al (1997) used the Behavioural Assessment of the Dysexecutive Syndrome (BADS) test which is a series of tasks the assess the skills and demands of everyday life. They found that individuals with schizophrenia had impaired executive functioning, as well as problems with their memory.
• Brune et al (2011) found evidence in a meta-analysis over 20 years of research this supported the idea the schizophrenia impaired metacognition, leaving patients with impairments in social functioning, self-reflection and empathy.