Cognitive Explanations

• what are cognitive deficits?

  sufferers experience problems with attention, communication and information overload.
• how do cognitive deficits lead to schizophrenia?

  • unable to deal with inappropriate thoughts, such as misperceiving voices in their head as people actually trying to speak to them, rather than perceiving them more sensibly as ‘inner speech’, which most people experience.
• what is cognitive bias?

  selective attention
• how does cognitive bias impact delusions?

  • The most common delusion that people diagnosed with schizophrenia report is that others are trying to harm or kill them (delusions of persecution).
  • These delusions are associated with specific biases in reasoning about social situations.
  • Many people who experience feelings of persecution have a general tendency to assume that other people cause the things that go wrong with their lives.
• what are the two types of dysfunctional thought processing?

  • Metarepresentation is our ability to reflect on thoughts and behaviour and it allows us to identify our goals and intentions, as well as allowing us to interpret the actions of others. Dysfunction in this area would disturb out ability to recognise our own actions
  • Central control is our ability to suppress automatic responses while we perform deliberate actions instead. Having disorganised speech could be due to an inability to suppress automatic thoughts and speech triggered by other thoughts.
• evaluation of cognitive explanations of schizophrenia (1)

  • There is evidence that suggests that information is processed differently. Stirling et al. (2006) compared 30 patients with schizophrenia with 18 controls on a range of cognitive tasks including the Stroop Test. In the Stroop Tests participants have to name the ink colours of colour words, therefore suppressing the impulse to read the words in order to do the task. The schizophrenic patients took twice as long to name the ink colours as the control group, indicating that they were struggling to have central control
• evaluation of cognitive explanations of schizophrenia (2)

  • Sarin and Wallin (2014) reviewed recent research relating to the role of cognitive biases and found supporting evidence for the claim that the positive symptoms of schizophrenia have their origin in faulty cognition. Delusional patients were found to show various biases in their informational processing. Also patients with hallucinations were found to have impaired self-monitoring and tended to experience their own thoughts as voices.
• evaluation of cognitive explanations of schizophrenia (3)

  • problems with cause and effect. Cognitive approaches do not explain the causes of cognitive deficits i.e. where the dysfunction comes from in the first place. Are the cognitive deficits causing the schizophrenic behaviour or is the schizophrenia the cause of the cognitive deficits? Links between symptoms and faulty cognitions are clear however, it is not possible to know the origin of those cognitions, therefore it is not possible to be certain that cognitive dysfunctions are the cause of the illness and not just an effect.