Psychological factors

• List psychological factors

  • Family dysfunction
  • Cognitive explanations
  • Socio-cultural factors
• Family dysfunction

  • Cold and dominant mother could create conflict
  • Bateson's double blind theory meaning faulty communication in families leads to contradictory messages
  • Expressed emotion environments create high levels of hostility and criticism to the schizophrenic individual
• Evidence for family dysfunction

  • Lidz et al investigated families and proposed dysfunctions such as emotionally distant parents impact child potentially leading to schiz
• Evidence against family dysfunction

  • Theory ignores biological evidence for schiz
  • Blames family
  • Most studies retrospective and were studied after onset of schiz
• Cognitive explanations

  • Cognitive psychs argue schiz caused by dysfunctional thought processing
  • Lead to delusions, thought interference, language impairment and memory issues
• Positives of cognitive explanation

  • Neufeld compare cognitive process of people with and without schiz
  • Schizs take longer to encode stimuli and had STM issues
  • Meyer-Lindenberg et al found schiz people had worse memory and poor reasoning task ability
• Negatives of cognitive explanations

  • Biochemical research suggests cognitive problems caused by increased dopamine not faulty informational processing
  • Faulty info processing result of increased dopamine levels
  • Cognitive explanations don't causes of schiz
• Socio-cultural factors

  • People with low social status more likely to have schiz than people with high social status
  • Poverty and discrimination cause high stress
• Positives of socio-cultural factors

  • Harrison et al found people born in deprived areas more likely to develop schiz , factors like poverty, unemployment and crowding impact schiz
  • Results are correlational and don't show cause and effect