Psych exp:cog exp

• People with schizophrenia process information differently to those without the disorder.
• What are the 2 types of dysfunctional thought processing?

  Meta representation 

  Central control 
• What’s meta representation?

  -The ability to reflect on thoughts and behaviour - allows us insight into our own intentions and goals

  -dysfunction - failure to recognise actions and thoughts as being our own - auditory hallucination & thought insertion
• What’s central control ?

  -the ability to supppress automatic responses while we deliberate 

  -disorganised speech - inability to suppress automatic thoughts and speech triggered by other thoughts

  -sz patients experience derailment of thoughts because each word triggers associations,which can’t be suppressed 
• One strength of cog explanations is evidence for dysfunctional for processing.Stirling et al (2006) compared the performance on a variety of cognitive tasks in 30 people with SZ and a control group of 30 people without SZ.Some of the tasks were the stroop test where patients had to name the font-colours of colour-words,so have to suppress the tendency to read the words aloud.As predicted by Frith et al’s central control theory,people with SZ took longer - over twice as long on avg to name the font colours. This matters as it increases validity for the cognitive explanations for schizophrenia 
• one limitation of cognitive explanations is there’s problems with cause and effect. cognitive approaches do not explain the causes of cognitive deficits i.e. where the dysfunction comes from in the first place.are the cognitive deficits causing the schizophrenic behaviour or is the schizophrenia the cause of the cognitive deficits? therefore, there is the possibility that the cause of the faulty cognitions is biological.Furthermore this is a limitation of the cognitive explanations because they can't explain the immediate cause of SZ and they can only the distal cause.