psychological explanations for schizophrenia

• family dysfunction


  a psychological explanation of schizophrenia, suggests it is the interpersonal relationships within the family that result in symptoms
• the schizophrenogenic mother 


  a psychodynamic theory that suggests that people with schizophrenia get their delusions as a result of the influence of a cold, rejecting, controlling mother and a passive father. The mother creates an atmosphere of stress, tension, and secrecy in the family. This atmosphere triggers psychotic thinking.
• double bind theory 


  • suggests that in a family where a child gets mixed messages from parents, the child feels unable to do their own thing.
  • . Bateson (1972) suggests that this upbringing results in disorganised thinking and paranoia.
• expressed emotion


   how emotion is conveyed by the carers/family of the sufferer

  exaggerated involvement: indicating the suffer isa burden via self sacrifice

  criticism and control: criticising the sufferer in order to control what they do

  hostility: physical, mental, verbal or emotional that suggests rejection
• strength : Butzlaff and Hooley (1998)


  showed via meta-analysis of 27 studies that relapse back into schizophrenia was twice as likely in families that had high expressed emotion
• (strength) Tienari (2004)


  studied the biological children of schizophrenic mothers who had been adopted.

  5.8% of those adopted into psychologically healthy families developed schizophrenia, compared to 36% of children raised in dysfunctional families

  this suggests that the interpersonal family environment has a significant impact on the development of sz in the genetically vulnerable
• weaknesses of family dysfunction

  • Family dysfunction has not been the subject of significant systematic research. Much of the research that has been done has been case studies, and these have idiographic problems. 
  • Family studies can’t be ethically controlled (can’t tell some families to be high expressed emotion as causes harm), so hard to demonstrate direct cause and effect
• cognitive explanations


  based on the assumption that the ability to process thoughts is dysfunctional / disorganised thinking
• Firth (1979)


  “Attention-deficit theory” suggests that schizophrenia is due to a faulty attention system unable to filter preconscious thoughts and gives too much significance to information that would usually be filtered out, thus overloading the mind. This accounts for positive symptoms such as hallucinations and delusions
• faulty central control


  the ability to suppress and override automatic actions and speech and make deliberate actions to achieve goals (Central Control) is sometimes faulty in schizophrenic patients

  •  Speech derailment (where a schizophrenic patient is having a conversation and randomly says something totally inappropriate to the message they are trying to convey) can also be explained by the inability to resist expressing automatic thoughts.
• meta representation

  • Meta-representation is the ability to identify your own thoughts and actions as your own by paying attention to them. Faults in the system result in delusions of control, feeling that your own actions are being created by an outside force.
• Stirling et al (2006)

  • conducted the stroop test on 30 patients with schizophrenia and 18 control patients. The task involved naming the ink colours without saying the word. This is difficult as there is desire to say the words that needs to be controlled. Stirling found that patients with schizophrenia took twice as long to name the colours as controls. This shows that patients with schizophrenia show deficits in Central control tasks, supporting Firth’s ideas.
• limitation of dysfunctional thought processing


  dysfunctional thought processing can only offer explanations for the indirect, proximal causes of SZ, and not the distal causes, meaning that such theories can explain the symptoms but not the origin of SZ. This limits the utility of psychological explanations for schizophrenia.
• Firth (1992)

  • supported these ideas with cognitive neuroscience studies. 30 schizophrenic patients with various symptoms had PET scans.
  • The scans showed reduction in the blood flow in the frontal cortex of patients with negative symptoms like Avolition and inability to suppress automatic thoughts. role: frontal cortex is to make decisions based on behaviours coming from other parts of the brain.
  • This demonstrates that there are differences in brain regions associated with the theorised cognitive processes, supporting the idea that cognitive processes are involved in schizophrenia.