Psychological Explanations

• Family dysfunction 


  Family dynamics have received a lot of attention when it comes to explaining schizophrenia. These theories believe that the problems within a family contribute to onset and relapse of schizophrenia
• Schizophrenogenic mother 


  A psychologist proposed that schizophrenia comes from being reared by a cold and dominant mother who is both overprotective but rejecting
• double bind 


  Suggesting that schizophrenia is a reaction to a pathological parent presenting the child with a no win situation. This is created by a contradictory communication between tone of voice and content
• Expressed emotion 


  Families persistently exhibit criticism, hostility and a general negative influence upon recovering schizophrenics, who when returning to their families react to the expressed emotion by relapsing and experiencing positive symptoms such as delusions
• cognitive approaches 


  examines mental processes. Schizophrenia is associated with several abnormal cognitive processes and cognitive explanations focus on these as the cause of schizophrenia
• Cognitive deficits 


  these occur when sufferers experience problems with attention, communication and information overload.
• Cognitive biases 


  refers to selective attention
• Delusions as a part of cognitive bias

  the most common is that others are trying to harm or kill them
• Auditory hallucinations as a part of cognitive bias

  To some extent, people see themselves in terms of their social relationships. Some people tend to see themselves powerless compared to other, more powerful individuals in their social network
• dysfunctional though processing 


  A psychologist identified two kinds of dysfunctional processings: metarepresentation an central control
• Metarepresentation 


  Our ability to reflect on thoughts and behaviour and it allows us to identify our goals and intentions as well as allowing us to interpret the actions of others
• Central control


  our ability to suppress automatic responses while we perform deliberate actions instead. Having disorganised speech could be due to an inability to suppress automatic thoughts and speech triggered by other thoughts