AO3

• One strength is supporting evidence for family dysfunction. A review by Read et al. reported that adults with schizophrenia are disproportionately likely to have insecure attachment. Also, 69% of women and 59% of men with SZ have a history of physical and or sexual abuse. This strongly suggests that family dysfunction can make people vulnerable to schizophrenia.
• A limitation is that there is weak evidence for family explanations. There is almost no evidence to support the importance of traditional family-based theories like schizophrenogenic mother and double bind. Both theories are based on clinical observation of patients and informed assessment of the personality of the mothers of patients. This means that family explanations have not been able to explain the link between childhood trauma and schizophrenia.
• A strength of cognitive explanations is supporting evidence for dysfunctional thought processing. Sterling et al. compared performance on a range of cognitive tasks, including the Stroop test with people with and without schizophrenia. As predicted by central control theory, people with schizophrenia took over twice as long on average to name the font colours. This supports the view that the cognitive processes of people with schizophrenia are impaired.
• A limitation is that only proximal origins of symptoms are explained. Cognitive explanations only explain what is happening now to produce symptoms. Cognitive explanations are weaker as distal explanations, which suggests what causes cognitive problems, may be more effective. Positive distal cognitive explanations are genetic and family dysfunction. This means that cognitive theories only provide partial explanations.