Cognitive dysfunction:

• STRENGTH:

  • Evidence for dysfunctional thought processing.
  • Stirling et al compared performance on a range of cognitive tasks in 30 people with schizophrenia and a control group of 30 people without schizophrenia
  • Tasks included the Stroop task , in which pp have to name the font-colours of colour-words, so have to suppress the tendency to read the words aloud
  • As predicted by Frith et al's central control theory, people with schizophrenia took longer - over twice as long on average - to name the font-colours

  This means that the cognitive processes of people with schizophrenia are impaired
• LIMITATION:

  • only explain the proximal origins of symptoms
  • Cognitive explanations for schizophrenia are proximal explanations because they explain what is happening now to produce symptoms - as distinct from distal explanations which focus on what initially caused the condition
  • Possible distal explanations are genetic
  • What is unclear is how childhood trauma might lead to problems with metarepresentation

  on their own only provide partial explanations for schizophrenia