Cognitive explanations + AO3

• Focus on impaired thought processes that characterise schizophrenia and faulty mechanisms that filter incoming stimuli and affect meaning

  • Focusses on mental processes
• Dysfunctional Thought Processing

  Frith identified two types of dysfunctional thinking:

  • meta-representation
  • central control
• Meta-representation

  • allows us to reflect on our own thoughts and actions as well as interpret those of others
  • dysfunction here would reduce our ability to recognise our own thoughts and behaviours as our own, not of others
  • explains why schizophrenics experience hallucinations and delusions
  • also means they cannot recognise or interpret the intentions of others
  • can cause paranoid delusions - thinking people are out to get them
• Central control

  • our ability to block/suppress automatic responses whilst performing deliberate actions or behaviours
  • e.g. for SZs, in conversation, each word can trigger associations they cannot suppress and derailment of thoughts
  • leading to disorganised speech - a positive symptom
• Delusions and hallucinations are due to dysfunction in meta-representation

  Disorganised speech is due to dysfunction in central control
• Strengths

  • Allen
  • brain scans during auditory hallucinations compared to controls - identifying recorded speech as their own or others'
  • SZ group: more errors; lower activation levels in superior temporal gyrus (Wernicke's) and anterior cingulate gyrus (responsible for emotional processing)
  • suggests dysfunction in these regions: issues in meta-representation = misinterpretation of internal voice as external sources, accounts for auditory hallucinations
  • Stirling - Stroop test
  • name the colour of the words, not the word itself
  • 30 SZs and 18 controls
  • SZs took twice as long to name the colour
  • support - dysfunction in central control may account for inability to filter out irrelevant sensory stimuli, resulting in hallucination
  • Help with future research and understanding of SZ
  • focus on cognition has helped in the development of CBT
  • therapists can identify and target issues
  • CBT had shown some success = useful and beneficial to SZs
• Limitations

  • Only explains cognitive deficits NOT their origins
  • this explanation claims dysfunction in central control and meta-representation are the cause of SZ
  • its likely these dysfunctions have a biological underpinning
  • the current cognitive explanation doesn't indicate which biological structures may cause these cognitive deficits = its an incomplete explanation = not very useful
  • further cognitive neuroscience research is required to gain full understanding between cognitive abilities and biological structures