cognitive explanation

• what do cognitive explanations argue

  schizophrenia is due to some sort of faulty information processing

  • better at explaining positive symptoms
• cognitive deficits

  problem with information processing - attention and info overload

  • most people who hear voice in their head recognize it as inner speech but an argument is that suffers incorrectly misinterpret this voice as someone speaking
  • may also have problems processing visual and auditory info
  • might have problems with communication as they have difficulties in understanding other people behavior
  • also associated with reduced levels of emotional expression, disorganized speech and delusions
• dysfunctional thought processing

  Frith identified two types that could cause symptoms

  • metarepresentation
  • central control
• meta representation

  is the ability to reflect on our thoughts and have insight into our own intentions and the intentions of others.

  • Dysfunction in metarepresentation means that we don’t have the ability to recognise our own thoughts and actions as ours, rather than someone else. They don’t recognise that their own thoughts are actually theirs which leads to hallucinations of hearing voices. It can also explain delusions like thought insertion, which is the experience that thoughts are being projected into your mind by others.
• central control

  • the ability to suppress automatic responses whilst we perform deliberate actions instead. Speech poverty and disorganised thoughts can arise from an inability to supress these automatic thoughts.This leads to a derailment of thoughts and disruption of speech.
• supporting evidence

  information is processed differently in the mind of a schizophrenic. Stirling at al. compared 30 patients with schizophrenia with 18 controls on a range of cognitive tasks including the Stroop Test. In the Stroop Tests participants must name the ink colours of colour words, therefore suppressing the impulse to read the words in order to do the task.

  • They found that the schizophrenic patients took twice as long to name the ink colours as the control group.
• supporting evidence

  Sarin and Wallin reviewed recent research relating to the role of cognitive biases and found supporting evidence for the claim that the positive symptoms of schizophrenia have their origin in faulty cognition. Delusional patients were found to showed biases in their informational processing, such as jumping to conclusions and lack of reality testing. Patients with hallucinations were also found to experience their own thoughts as voices. This supports the idea that schizophrenic patients do have cognitive deficits in information processing.
• weakness

  it doesn’t tell us anything about the origin of these issues. The links between the symptoms and the faulty cognitions are clear, but what caused these faulty cognitions in the first place? Researchers have argued that cognitive explanations are good at explaining the proximal cause (what causes the current symptoms) but not the distal causes (the origin of the condition). = it is a limited explanation.
• strength

  positive applications of the theory

  Yellowless et al. (2002) developed a machine that produced virtual hallucinations, such as hearing the television telling you to kill yourself or one person’s face morphing into another’s. This was designed to show schizophrenics that their hallucinations are not real. This suggests that understanding the effects of cognitive deficits allows for the design of effective treatments to help improve the quality of their lives
• strength

  many cognitive behavioural therapies have been used to treat schizophrenia and have been shown to be effective.

  NICE (2014) conducted a review of treatments for schizophrenia, they found that consistently when compared with antipsychotic medication, CBT was more effective in reducing symptoms and improving levels of social functioning. If a treatment which aims to change faulty information processing is effective at treating schizophrenia, this suggests that faulty cognitions caused the schizophrenia in the first place.