Cognitive approach

• Dysfunctional thought processing

  cognitive habits or beliefs that cause the individual to evaluate information inappropriately and produces undesirable consequences 

  Identified 2 kinds, meta-representation and centra control
• Meta-representation

  cognitive ability to reflect on thoughts and behaviour which allow us insight into our own intentions and goal

  dysfunction in this disrupts our ability to reflect on our own thoughts and actions 
• Central control

  cognitive ability to suppress automatic responses while we perform deliberate actions instead

  schizophrenics lack central control, it leads to confusion in speech, seeming very distracted, confused and disoriented.
• A strength of cognitive explanations is evidence for dysfunctional thought processing.

  compared performance on a range of cognitive tasks in 30 people with schizophrenia and a control group of 30 people without schizophrenia.

  Tasks included the Stroop task, in which participants have to name the font-colours of colour-words, so have to suppress the tendency to read the words aloud.

  As predicted central control theory, people with schizophrenia took longer to name the font-colours. This means that the cognitive processes of people with schizophrenia are impaired.
• A limitation of cognitive explanations is that they only explain the proximal origins of symptoms. Cognitive explanations for schizophrenia are proximal explanations because they explain what is happening now to produce symptoms not what initially caused the condition.

  What is currently unclear and not well-addressed is how genetic variation or childhood trauma might lead to problems with metarepresentation or central control.

  This means that cognitive theories on their own only provide partial explanations for schizophrenia.