psychological explanations for schizophrenia

• What did Gregory Bateson suggest about how schizophrenia develops?

  children who frequently receive contradicting messages from their parents are more likely to develop schizophrenia
• state two explanations of family dysfunction that can be used to explain how schizophrenia develops

  • double bind theory
  • expressed emotion
• what is meant by family dysfunction?

  presence of problems within a family that contribute to relapse rates in recovering schizophrenics
• describe the double bind theory

  • children receive contradicting messages from their parents (eg- a mother saying she loves her child but turning her head away in disgust as she says it)
  • conflicting verbal and non verbal messages
  • Child's ability to respond to the mother is incapacitated by such contradictions as one message invalidates the other
  • these interactions prevent the development of an internal coherent construction of reality, in the long term, manifested as schizophrenic symptoms
• what is meant by expressed emotion?

  family communication style in which members of a family of a psychiatric patient talk about the patient in a critical or hostile manner, or in a way which indicates over-involvement or over-concern
• what did Kuipers et al discover about EE families?

  high EE relatives talk more and listen less
• What did Linszen et al discover about schizophrenics in EE families?

  a patient returning to a family with high EE is four times as likely to relapse than a patient whose family is low in EE
• What does the inability to cope in high EE families suggest about patients with schizophrenia?

  • they have a low tolerance for intense stimuli
  • negative emotional climate arouses patient and leads to stress beyond their coping mechanisms, thus triggering a schizophrenic episode
• what two cognitive explanations are given for schizophrenia?

  • cognitive explanations for delusions
  • cognitive explanations for hallucinations
• what is meant by dysfunctional thought processing?

  cognitive beliefs that cause individual to evaluate information inappropriately
• what aspects do cognitive explanations for schizophrenia emphasise?

  • role of dysfunctional thought processing
  • to people who display characteristic positive symptoms (eg- hallucinations and delusions)
• Describe the cognitive explanations for delusions

  • patient's interpretations of their experiences are controlled by inadequate info processing
  • egocentric bias- person perceives themselves as central component in events, so jumps to conclusions about external events
  • relate irrelevant events to themselves
  • arrive at false conclusions
  • impervious to reality testing- schizophrenic doesn't go through normal reality testing that a healthy individual does
  • "impaired insights"-can't recognise cognitive distortions and substitute them for realistic explanations
• describe the cognitive explanation for hallucinations

  • hypervigilance- schizophrenic individuals focus excessively on auditory stimuli
  • therefore have a higher expectancy for the occurrence of hearing a voice
  • Aleman- hallucination prone individuals can't distinguish between imagery and sensory based stimuli
  • more likely to misattribute the source of a self-generated auditory experience to an external source than a non-schizophrenic
  • These errors aren't corrected by disconfirming evidence because schizophrenics don't go though the same reality testing as normal people
• evaluation for family dysfunction?

  • 😊 Linszen et al- a patient returning to a family high in EE is four times as likely to relapse than a patient returning to a family low in EE
  • 😊 Tienari et al adoption study- adopted kids with schiz parents more likely to become ill than kids without schiz parents (6.7% schiz parents, 2% non-schiz parents). But the difference only emerged when the adopted family was rated as disturbed. Shows that only genetic vulnerability cannot alone explain schiz
  • ☹️ enviro determinism- events in the enviro may not necessarily predispose one to schiz- could have genetic basis, genes could explain that schizophrenics are always inevitable to relapse
• evaluation of cognitive explanations?

  • 😊 NICE- consistent evidence that when compared to treatment with antipsychotics, CBTp was more effective in reducing schizophrenic symptom severity. Reinforces the idea that schiz has origins in faulty cognition.
  • ☹️ intergrated model is needed- cognitive explanations deal with one aspect of the disorder but fail to explain other aspects- Howes and Murray- exposure to stressors causes the release of dopamine, increased dopamine activity causes hallucinations and paranoia, which means more stress is experienced, which contributes to more dopamine released. Needs to explain how enviro stressors induce dopamine release and cause schiz symptoms