Psychological Explanation S

• Family Dysfunction


  Schizophrenia symptoms are due to the interpersonal relationships within the family
• Schizophrenogenic Mother


  Psychodynamic theory, 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
• Double-Bind Theory


  DUe to mixed messages, feels unable to do the correct thing, leading to disorganised thinking and paranoia
• Expressed Emotion


  Verbal interactions of exaggurated involvement, indicating the sufferer is a burden via self-sacrifice
• Criticism and Control


  Suffers behaviourally and physically, verbal emotional hostility towards the sufferer = rejection
• Cognitive Explanation - Firth (1979)

  Ability to process thoughts is dysfunctional, Attention Deficit theory claimed a faulty attention system cannot filter preconscious thought and gives too much significance to the information that would usually be filtered, overloading the mind
• Delusions of Control


  A fault in meta-representation, ability to identify your thoughts and actions as your own
• (+) A03: Butzlaff + Hooley (1998)


  Meta-analysis of 27 studies, showing relapse into schizophrenia is significantly more likely in familes with issues of expressed emotion
• (+) A03: Tienari (2004)


  Investigated children with schizophrenic mothers

  • Found that only 5.8% of children developed schizophrenia in normal households, compared to 36.8% in dysfunctional families
• (-) A03: Social Sensitivity


  Socially sensitive to blame families for the development of schizophrenia, there is an emphasis of alpha bias on the schizophrenogenic mother, which could cause psychological harm in them
• (+) A03: Stirling (2006)


  Found that patients with schizophrenia took twice as long to name the colour in the Stroop test as the control, suggesting dysfunctional thought processing, with faulty central control (ability to supress and override automatic actions and speech)