Cognitive explanations of schizophrenia

• Cognitive Explanation of Schizophrenia


  Explanations that focus on mental processes such as thinking, language and attention
• Dysfunctional Thought Processing 


  Information processing that does not represent reality accurately and produces undesirable consequences
• Dysfunctional Thinking

  • Schizo leads to disruption to normal thought processing
  • Reduced thought processing in the ventral striatum is associated with negative symptoms
• Metarepresentation dysfunction

  • The cognitive ability to reflect on thoughts and behaviours
  • Allow us insight into our own intentions and goals and interpret the actions of others
  • Dysfunction of this would disrupt our ability to recognise our own actions as being carried out ourselves or by someone else
  • Explains hallucinations such as hearing voices and delusions such as thought insertion
• Central Control Dysfunction

  • Issues with the cognitive ability to suppress automatic responses while performing deliberate actions
  • Speech poverty and thought disorder could result from the inability to suppress automatic thoughts and speech triggered by other thoughts
  • People with schizo experience derailment of thoughts as each word trigger associations that they cannot suppress
• AO3 Cognitive Explanations: Research Support

  • 30 patients with schizo were compared with 30 without schizo on a range of cognitive tasks one of which included the Stroop test
  • Tests their ability to suppress words as patients name the colors of words rather than reading the words which are named colors
  • Patients with the disorder took over twice as long as the control group to name the font colours
  • Cognitive processes of people with schizo are impaired
• AO3 Cognitive Explanations: Unclear the origins of schizophrenia

  • It does not tell us anything about the origins of abnormal cognitions
  • It could be argued that dysfunctional thought processes are merely symptoms of a biological cause rather than the cause itself which undermines this explanation
  • Both biological and psychological factors separately produce the same symptoms raising questions of validity and whether it is schizo
  • Reductionist as it explains a complex disorder in terms of cognitive symptoms
• AO3 Cognitive Explanations: Real World Application

  • Dysfunctional cognition can better characterise schizophrenia
  • Can construct a specific cognitive deficit profile to help with the diagnosis of the disorder
  • Help improve the poor reliability in diagnosis of the disorder
  • Can create more targeted treatment to better treat schizo
• AO3 Cognitive Explanations: Psychological or Biological

  • The cognitive approach provides an excellent explanation for the symptoms of schizo
  • Therefore an argument for seeing schizo as a psychological condition
  • But it appears that the abnormal cognition associated with schizo is partly genetic in origin and the result of abnormal brain development
  • This would suggest schizo is biological