Cognitive explanations

• What is the cognitive explanations?

  Internal mental processes, focuses on the impaired thought processes that characterise schizophrenia- disturbed thinking processes are the cause of schizophrenia
• What are the cognitive explanations?

  Dysfunctional thinking

  Meta representation dysfunction

  Central control dysfunction
• What is dysfunctional thinking?

  The role of mental processes- schizophrenia is associated with several types of dysfunctional thought processing

  Schizophrenia is characterised by disruption to normal thought processing, this is many schizophrenic symptoms.

  Reduced thought processing in the ventral striatum is associated with negative symptoms, and reduced processing of information in the temporal and cingulate gyri is associated with hallucinations (Simon 2015)
• What is meta representation dysfunction?

  Frith (1992) 2 kinds of dysfunctional thought processes

  meta representation= cognitive ability to reflect on thoughts and behaviour

  This allows insight into our own intentions and goals and allows us to interpret the actions of others.

  Dysfunction in this 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.
• What is Central control dysfunction?

  Frith

  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.

  EG/ people with schizophrenia experience derailment thoughts because each word triggers associations and the person cannot suppress automatic responses to these
• AO3- Supporting evidence

  E- Stirling (2006) compared performance on a range of cognitive tasks in 30 people with schizophrenia and a control group of 30 people without. Tasks included Stroop task, participants had to name the front-colours of colour-words so have to suppress the tendency to read words aloud. People with schizophrenia took longer.

  E/L- There is a difference in cognitive functioning adding validity to the psychological explanation. Supporting the claim that cognitive dysfunction & impairment are contributing factors in causing schizophrenia, not cause but explanation- c & e
• AO3- Only explains proximal- current symptoms as apposed to the true origin

  E- They explain what is happening now to produce symptoms, as distinct from distal explanations which focus on what initially caused the condition. Distal explanations such as genetic and family dysfunction- unclear how genetic variation or childhood trauma might lead to problems with metarepresentation or central control

  E/L- Arguably genetic and family dysfunction is better explanation, the true cause of schizophrenia. need to take into account an interactionist explanation looking at biological as well
• AO3- Reductionist explanation- cognitive on its own

  E- The abnormal cognition associated with schizophrenia is partly genetic in origin and the result of abnormal brain development in ventral striatum- Toulopoulou 2019 (biological basis)- can explain positive and negative symptoms as it provides an explanation for symptoms

  E/L- Further evidence that cognitive explanation is limited when used by itself as its too simplistic and too reductionist