Cognitive explanation

• Research has found evidence of dysfunctional thought processing in people with SZ
• Cognitive explanations of delusions

  The individual perceives themselves as the central component in events (egocentric bias) and so jumps to conclusions about external events .

  Patient will relate irrelevant events to them and have false conclusions
• Cognitive explanations of hallucinations

  Hallucinating individuals focus excessive attention on auditory stimuli and so have a higher expectancy for the occurrence of a voice than normal.

  Hallucination prone individuals find it difficult to distinguish between imagery and sensory-based perception
• Cognitive explanations of hallucinations ctd

  Individuals may misattribute the source of a self generated auditory experience to an external source.

  These errors are not corrected because patients with SZ do not go through the same processes of reality testing than others would do
• Christopher Frith identified two kinds of dysfunctional thought processing that could underlie some symptoms:

  • Metarepresentation
  • Central control
• Metarepresentation - cognitive ability to reflect on thoughts and behaviour. This allows us insight into our own intentions and goals, and to interpret 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

  This would explain hallucinations of voices and delusions
• Central control - the cognitive ability to suppress automatic responses while we perform deliberate actions instead
• Disorganised speech and thought disorder could result from the inability to suppress automatic thoughts and speech triggered by other thoughts
• Sufferers with SZ tend to experience derailment of thoughts and spoken sentences because each word triggers associations and the patient cannot suppress automatic responses to these
• AO3 - Sarin and Wallin

  Reviewed recent research evidence relating to cognitive model of schizophrenia. Found supporting evidence for the claim that the positive symptoms have their origins in faulty cognition.

  Delusional patients were found to show various biases in their information processing. SZ individuals with hallucinations were found to have impaired self moitoring
• AO3 - Sarin and Wallin ctd

  They also found that patients with negative symptoms also displayed dysfunctional thought processes such as having low expectations regarding pleasure and success
• AO3 - success of cognitive therapies

  In CBT patients are encouraged to evaluate the content of their delusions or any voices and consider ways they might test the validity of their faulty beliefs.

  In a review it was found that compared with antipsychotic drugs, CBT was more effective in reducing symptom severity and improving social functioning
• AO3 - descriptive

  Cognitive explanations are descriptive rather than explanatory. Describing the fact that dysfunctional thinking may cause SZ but does not explain how or why this develops. Simplistic explanation
• AO3 - cause and effect

  Difficult to establish cause and effect. We do not really know if the dysfunctional thinking causes the schizophrenia or whether the schizophrenia causes the dysfunctional thinking. This suggests cognitive explanations may not be valid
• AO3 - other explanations

  Fails to consider other explanations which have evidence to support them such as biological and fmaily dysfunction.

  This suggests that they are a reductionist explanation and an interactionist approach may be better