psychological explanations for schizophrenia

• Bateson et al. described how a child may be regularly trapped in situations where they fear doing the wrong thing, but receive conflicting messages about what counts as wrong. When they 'get it wrong' the child is punished by withdrawal of love so they learn the world is confusing and dangerous, leading to disorganised thinking and delusions
• Expresses emotion (EE) is the level of emotion expressed including:

  • verbal criticism of the person with SZ
  • hostility towards the person with SZ
  • emotional over-involvement in the persons with SZ

  High levels of EE causes stress which may trigger onset or relapse of SZ
• Lower levels of information processing in some areas of the Brian suggest cognition is impaired. For example, reduced processing in the ventral striatum is associated with negative symptoms of SZ
• Metarepresentation is the cognitive ability select on thoughts and behaviour. This dysfunction disrupts our ability to recognise our thoughts as our own. This could lead to the sensation of hearing voices (hallucination) and experience of having thoughts places in the mind by others
• Frth et al. also identified dysfunction od central control as a way to explain speech poverty. Central control is the cognitive ability to suppress automatic responses while performing deliberate actions. People with schizophrenia experience derailment of thoughts because each word triggers automatic associations that they cannot suppress
• One strength of family dysfunction is there is evidence linking it to schizophrenia. A review by Read et al. reported that adults with SZ are disproportionately likely to have insecure attachment. Also, 69% of women and 59% of men with SZ have a history of physical and/or sexual abuse. This strongly suggests that family dysfunction does make people more vulnerable to SZ
• One limitation is poor evidence base for any of the explanations. There is almost no evidence to support the importance of traditional family-based theories like schizophrenogenic mother and double bind. Both theories are based on clinical observation of patients and informal assessment of the personality of the mothers of patients. This means that family explanations have not been able to explain the link between childhood trauma and SZ
• One strength for dysfunctional thought processing is evidence to support. Stirling et al. compared performance on a range of cognitive tasks in people with and without SZ. As predicted by central control therapy, people with SZ took over twice as long on average to name the font colours. This supports the view that the cognitive processes of people with SZ are impaired