cognitive

• Cognitive explanations

  Schizophrenia is associated with several types of abnormal information processing, which can provide possible explanations for schizophrenia as a whole.

  Schizophrenia is characterised by disruption to normal thought processing.

  Frith et al identified multiple kinds of dysfunctional thought processing:

  • meta-representation
  • central control
• Meta-representation

  The cognitive ability  to reflect on thoughts and behaviour. This allows us insight to our own intentions and goals as well as interpret the actions of others.

  Dysfunction in metarepresentation would disrupt our ability to recognise our own actions and thoughts as being carried out by ourselves rather than someone else explaining hallucinations and delusions. (thought-insertion)
• Central control

  The cognitive ability to suppress automatic responses while we perform deliberate actions instead. Disorganised speech and thoughts could result in the inability to suppress automatic thoughts and speech triggered by other thoughts and things. This results in the schizophrenic symptoms of derailment and disorganised speech.
• Ego centric bias

  Patients see themselves as the central component in events. They have delusions about self-reference such as news stories being about the patient.
• Lack of reality-testing

  Inability to recognise distorted or irrational behavior, or find more rational explanations.
• Sensory hypervigilance

  Schizophrenics pay much greater attention to stimuli from the senses such as sound, this means they have greater chance of ‘hearing’ thing.
• Evidence for biological factors is not adequately considered

  Psychological explanations for schizophrenia can be hard to reconcile with the biological explanations. It could be that both biological and psychological factors can separately produce the same symptoms, which raises the question of whether both outcomes are really schizophrenia. Alternatively, we can view this in terms of the diathesis-stress model where the diathesis may be biological or psychological.
• Direction of causality

  There is lots of information concerning abnormal cognitions as well as a mass of information about abnormal biology in schizophrenia. However, it remains unclear what causes what, including whether cognitive factors are a cause or/a result of the neural correlates and abnormal neurotransmitter levels seen in schizophrenia.

  This questions the utility of the psychological explanation for schizophrenia as you are not able to form a valid cause and effect relationship.