psychological explanations for schizophrenia

• family dysfunction?

  processes within a family such as poor family communication, cold parenting and high levels of expressed emotion. can be risk factors for development and maintenance of schizophrenia.
• schizophrenogenic mother?

  is cold, rejecting and controlling and tends to create a family climate characterised by tension and secrecy. leads to distrust later developing into paranoid delusions
• double-bind theory?

  emphasises role of communication style in a family. developing child feels trapped in situations where they fear doing the wrong thing but receive mixed messages about what this is and feels unable to comment on the unfairness of the situation or seek clarification. when they get it wrong they're punished by withdrawal of love. leaves them thinking the world is dangerous and confusing which is reflected in symptoms like disorganised thinking and paranoid delusions.
• expressed emotion?

  level of emotion expressed towards a person with schizophrenia by their family members. contains several elements like:

  -verbal criticism

  -hostility towards them

  -emotional overinvolvement
• dysfunctional thought processing?

  information processing that doesn't represent reality accurately and produces undesirable consequences. reduced thought processing in the ventral striatum associated with negative symptoms whilst reduced processing of information in the temporal and cingulate gyri associated with hallucinations.
• metarepresentation dysfunction?

  cognitive ability to reflect on thoughts and behaviours. allows us insight into our own intentions and goals and to interpret the actions of others. disrupts our ability to recognise our own actions and thoughts as being carried out by ourselves rather than someone else.
• central control dysfunction?

  issues with the cognitive ability to suppress automatic responses while we perform deliberate actions. speech poverty and abolition could result from the inability to suppress automatic thoughts and speech triggered by other thoughts.
• strength of family explanations?

  P - evidence linking family dysfunction to schizophrenia

  E - indicators of family dysfunction include insecure attachment and exposure to childhood trauma. in a review by read et al, adults with schizophrenia are disproportionately likely to have insecure attachment particularly type C or D. reported that 69% of women and 59% of men with schizophrenia have a history of physical or sexual abuse. morkved et al found that most adults with schizophrenia reported at least 1 childhood trauma.

  L - family dysfunction makes people more vulnerable to schizophrenia
• limitation of family explanations?

  P - poor evidence base for any of the explanations

  E - no evidence to support the importance of traditional family based theories such as the schizophrenogneic mother and double-bind. both these theories are based on clinical observation of people with schizophrenia and also informal assessment of their mothers personalities but not systematic evidence.

  L - family explanations have not been able to account for the link between childhood trauma and schizophrenia.
• strength of cognitive explanations?

  P - evidence for dysfunctional thought processing

  E - stirling et al 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 so had to suppress the tendency to read the words aloud. people with SZ took longer to name the font colours.

  L - cognitive processes of people with schizophrenia are impaired.
• limitation of cognitive explanations ?

  P - only explain the proximal origins of symptoms.

  E - cognitive explanations for schizophrenia are only proximal explanations as they explain what is happening now to produce the symptoms - as distinct from distal explanation which focus on what initially caused the condition. possible distal explanations are genetic and family dysfunction explanations. whats currently unclear and not well addressed is how frenetic variation or childhood tram may lead to problems with metarepresentation or central control.

  L - cognitive theories on their own only provide partial explanations for schizophrenia.