psych explanations

• There are two psychological explanations of schizophrenia: family dysfunction and cognitive explanations.
• Family dysfunction is a pattern of family functioning that is characterized by conflict, dysfunction, and disruption. It's sub-sectioned into the double-bind theory, the schizophrenogenic mother, and expressed emotion.
• Bateson et al suggested the double bind theory, in which the way a family communicates can lead to the development of schizophrenia. A child regularly finds themselves in situations where they fear doing the wrong thing, but they receive mixed messages, and when they’re wrong, the child is often punished with withdrawal of love, leaving them confused and fearful. This could manifest itself as disorganised thoughts and paranoia.
• Schizophrenogenic mother: paranoid delusions result from the influence of a cold, rejecting and controlling mother and a passive father. An atmosphere of stress and secrecy triggers psychotic thinking
• Expressed emotion is the level of negative emotion which is expressed towards a patient by their carers (e,g verbal criticism and hostility). This could be an environmental trigger to a genetically vulnerable person.
• Reduced processing in the temporal and cingulate gyri are associated with hallucinations. This lower level of processing suggests some form of cognitive impairment.
• Frith et al (1992) believes there are 2 kinds of dysfunctional thought processing which takes place: metarepresentation and central control
• Metarepresentation relates to our ability to reflect on our own thoughts and behaviour. Someone with dysfunction in this area would disrupt their ability to recognise their own thoughts and actions and could explain hallucinations of voices or delusions where others take control of the individual.
• Central control is the ability to suppress automatic responses while we perform other tasks. The inability to suppress automatic responses may account for speech triggered by other thoughts and the derailment of sentences
• Read et al reviewed 46 studies of child abuse and schizophrenia and concluded that 69% of women diagnosed with schizophrenia had a history of abuse compared with 59% in men.
• cases following the development of schizophrenia may have distorted memories due to their sz which questions the validity of the accounts.
• Dysfunctional family explanations blame the parents which may be unjust. The move towards community based care, which required the involvement of parents, in the 1980s has led to a decline in these theories. This is a limitation as the evidence for family based explanations is weak and leads to socially sensitive research, meaning the findings must be handled with more consciousness.
• Sterling et al (2006) compared 30 schizophrenic patients with 18 controls on a range of cognitive tasks such as the STROOP test in which participants had to name the colour the word is written in, suppressing an impulse to read the words. Schizophrenic patients took over twice as long to complete this task, suggesting they had more difficulty in suppressing automatic processing.