Psychological explanations

• Family dysfunction= attempted to link schizophrenia to childhood and adult experiences of living in dysfunctional families.
• The schizophrenic mother

  • Frieda Fromm-Reichmann
  • Schizophrenic mother is cold, rejecting and controlling and tends to create a family climate characterised by tension and secrecy.
  • This leads to distrust and later develops into paranoid delusions and schizophrenia.
• Double-blind theory

  • Bateson emphasised the role of communication style within a family.
  • Developing child regularly finds themselves trapped in situations where they fear doing the wrong thing, but receive mixed messaged about what this is, and feel unable to comment on the unfairness of this situation or seek clarification.
  • When incorrect the child is punished by with drawl of love. This leaves them with an understanding of the world as confusing and dangerous and this is reflected in symptoms like disorganised thinking and paranoid delusions.
• Expressed emotion

  =Level of emotion (mainly negative) expressed towards a person with schizophrenia by their carers.

  • Verbal criticism, sometimes accompanied by violence.
  • Hostility towards the person, including anger and rejection.
  • Emotional over involvement in the life of the person, including needless self-sacrifice.
  • These high levels of expressed emotion are a serious cause of stress and is an explanation for relapse in people with schizophrenia. May trigger the onset of schizophrenia in a person who Is already vulnerable.
• Evaluation- evidence linking family dysfunction and schizophrenia.

  • Indicators of family dysfunction include insecure attachment and exposure to childhood trauma.
  • Read found adults with schizophrenia are disproportionately likely to have insecure attachment.
  • Also reported that 69% of women and 59% of men with schizophrenia have a history of physical or sexual abuse.
  • Morkved found that ost adults with schizophrenia reported at least one childhood trauma.
  • Suggests family dysfunction makes people more vulnerable to schizophrenia.
• Evaluation- explanations lack support

  • No evidence to support the importance of traditional family based theories such as the schizophrenic mother and double bind.
  • Both these theories are based on clinical assessment of their mothers personalities but not systematic evidence.
  • Means that family explanations haven't been able to account for the link between childhood trauma and schizophrenia.
• Dysfunctional thinking= focuses on the role of mental processes.
• Dysfunctional thought processing= information processing that does not represent reality accurately and produces undesirable consequences.

  • Schizophrenia is characterised by disruption to normal thoughts processing.
  • Reduced thought processing in the verbal striatum is associated with negative symptoms, whilst reduced processing of information in the temporal and cingulate gyri is associated with hallucinations.
• Meta representation dysfunctioning

  = The cognitive ability to reflect on thoughts and behaviour. This allows insight into our own intentions and goals, allows us to interpret the actions of others. Theory by Frith.

  • Dysfunction in meta representation would disrupt our ability to recognise our own actions and thoughts as being carried out by ourselves rather than someone else.
  • This would explain hallucinations of hearing voices and delusions like thought insertion.
• Central control dysfunctioning

  • Frith identified issues with the cognitive ability to suppress automatic responses while we perform deliberate actions.
  • Speech poverty and thought disorder could result from the inability to suppress automatic thoughts and speech triggered by other thoughts.
• Evaluation- evidence for dysfunctional thought processing

  • Stirling compared performance on a range of cognitive tasks in 30 people with schizophrenia and a control group.
  • Tasks included the stroop task in which participants have to name the font colour of colour words, so have to suppress the tendency to read the words aloud.
  • People with schizophrenia took over twice as long to name the font colour.
  • So cognitive processes of people with schizophrenia are impaired.
• Evaluation- a proximal explanation

  • Cognitive explanations for schizophrenia are proximal explanations because they explain what is happening now to produce symptoms- as distinct from distal explanations which focus on what initially causes the condition.
  • Possible distal explanations are genetic and family dysfunction explanations.
  • It's not clear how genetic variation or childhood trauma might lead to schizophrenia.
  • So cognitive theories only provide a partial explanation.