Psychological Explanations - Cognitive

• the cognitive explanation

  • focuses on the role of mental processes
  • SCZ is associated with several types of abnormal information processing and these can provide possible explanations for SCZ as a whole
• metarepresentation

  • reflection and recognition of our own thoughts and behaviour
  • allows us insight into our own intentions and goals and interpret the actions of actions
  • disrupt our ability to recognise our own actions and thoughts as being carried out by ourselves rather than someone else
  • explains hallucinations of voices and delusions like thought insertion
• central control

  • suppressing automatic responses while we perform deliberate actions instead
  • disorganised speech and though disorder could result from the inability to suppress automatic thoughts and speech triggered by other thoughts
  • e.g. people with SCZ tend to experience derailment of thought as spoken sentences because each word triggers associations and the person cannot suppress automatic responses
• lack of reality testing


  they don't know what is realistic and what isn't
• egocentric bias

  • thinking that things are happening in relation to them
  • e.g. police on the news coming to them
• evidence for the cognitive explanation

  • Stirling et al (2006) - patients poorer at central control than control subjects, supports cognitive models. However, high standard deviation in SCZ means that there could be high individual differences
  • Sarin and Wallin (2014) - meta-analysis of observation/interviews of patients behaviour and thought processes found that patients jump to conclusions and experience thought as voice, supporting the cognitive models of SCZ
  • However, a lot of data rely on correlation and self-report which lacks both validity and reliability
• explanatory power

  • doesn't tell us anything about the origins of the disorder - explains proximal not distal causes
  • may be an over simplification (e.g. abnormalities in dopamine and family and twin studies show that it is genetic)
  • ignores biological factors
• application

  • NICE (2014) reviewed evidence of cognitive therapies
  • more effective than biological treatments at improving functioning
  • CBT is not effective for everyone, so this suggests that there are other factors involved in SCZ, so it may not solely be cognitive