Psychological Explanations

• Fromm-Reichmann (1948) suggested the idea of the 'schizophrenic mother or family' when women who are cold and controlling and create a rearing environment characterised by tension and secrecy leads to children developing the disorder, as the individual may regress to an early stage in their development before the ego was properly formed and before they developed a realistic awareness of the external world
• people with schizophrenia can't resolve the conflict between the demands of the id and the overwhelming guilt imposed by the superego, and so they regress to an early infantile stage of development with some symptoms reflecting this condition and other symptoms
• another family variable associated with schizophrenia is a negative emotional climate or more specifically, a high degree of expressed emotions. expressed emotion is a family communication style that involves criticism, hostility and emotional over-involvement and over-concern
• Linszen et al (1997) suggested that high levels of expressed emotions are most likely to influence relapse rates. a patient returning to a family with high EE is about four times more likely to relapse than a patient returning to a family with low EE
• Kalafi and Torabi (1996) found that that the high prevalence of expressed emotion in Iranian culture was one of the main causes of schizophrenic relapses. it appears that the negative emotional climate in these families arouses the patient and lead to stress beyond their already impaired mechanisms, therefore triggering a schizophrenia episode
• Bateson et al (1959) suggested that children who frequently receive contradictory messages from their parents are more likely to develop schizophrenia
• schizophrenia is characterised by profound thought disturbance which cognitive psychologists suggest is the cause, rather than the consequence, of schizophrenia
• the cognitive viewpoint is that maladaptive thinking is strongly linked to schizophrenia, and many of it's symptoms , which suggests a cognitive input
• Hemsley (1993) proposed that a breakdown occurs between information already stored in memory and new incoming data. stored information is used to create schemas that allow us to interpret and deal with current situations but in schizophrenics, such schemas aren't activated, sensory overload occurs and the sufferer can't determine what to attend to and what to ignore which leads to delusional thinking
• Metarepresentation: this is the cognitive ability to reflect on thoughts and behaviour. this helps us to have insight into our intentions and goals. a disruption to this process would cause us to have problems in being able to recognise our own actions and thoughts as being carried out by ourselves. this explains the hallucinations
• central control: the cognitive ability to surpass automatic responses while we perform deliberate actions instead. disorganised speech and thought disorder could result from the inability to suppress automatic thoughts and spoken sentences because each word triggers associations and the patient can't suppress automatic responses to these
• Tienari et al (2000) 164 adoptees whose mothers had a diagnosis of schizophrenia compared to control which was 2%
• according to Beck and Rector (2005) positive symptoms are seen to occur due to cognitive biases and biased information processing. whereas negative symptoms are seen to occur due to control symptoms aiming to control their high levels of emotion